At the 2025 GTC conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced a major cooperation plan, which will jointly develop a physics engine called "Newton" with Disney Research and Google DeepMind. The core goal of this engine is to simulate the movement of the robot in a real environment and provide powerful technical support for future entertainment robots.
Disney will be one of the first companies to adopt Newton technology, which is expected to be applied to its next generation of entertainment robots, such as the Star Wars-inspired BDX robot. In Huang Renxun’s keynote speech, a BDX robot took the stage on the spot, vividly demonstrating its excellent athletic ability and attracted the attention of the audience.
Nvidia plans to release an early open source version of Newton later in 2025. For years, Disney has been working to bring these Star Wars-inspired robots to its global theme parks. Previously, these robots have conducted control demonstrations on multiple occasions, the most recent one was at the 2025 SXSW exhibition. Now, thanks to Newton's support, Disney is full of confidence and plans to display the robots in multiple theme parks starting next year.
Kyle Laughlin, Disney's vice president of creative engineering, said in a press release that the collaboration with Nvidia and Google DeepMind will play an important role in the technological development of Disney entertainment robots in the future. Newton is designed to enable robots to be more “expressive” and “learn how to handle complex tasks more accurately.” This physics engine can help developers simulate how robots interact with the natural world, which is a big challenge for robot developers.
Nvidia said Newton is highly customizable, and developers can use this engine to program it to allow robots to interact with deformable objects such as food, fabric, and sand. In addition, Newton will be compatible with Google's DeepMind's robot development tool ecosystem, including MuJoCo, a physics engine for simulating the movement of multi-joint robots.
In addition to Newton, Nvidia also released several important news at this conference, including a basic AI model Groot N1 for humanoid robots. This model is designed to help robots better perceive and reason about their surroundings. In addition, Nvidia also shared its timeline for its next-generation AI chips, including Blackwell Ultra and Rubin, and launched a series of "personal AI computers."
Key points:
Nvidia collaborates with Google DeepMind to develop the Newton physics engine to simulate robot motion.
Disney plans to launch Star Wars-inspired BDX robots in its theme parks to showcase its advanced technology.
The Newton engine is highly customizable and supports robots to interact with a variety of objects.