The initiative aims to lower costs and shorten timelines by minimizing reliance on physical prototypes across products and assembly lines.

The collaboration reflects a broader trend of using digital simulations for production planning and robot setup to preempt issues before deployment, reducing costs and time-to-market.

The goal is to deliver physical AI at scale by cutting real-world setup time and costs through minimized physical training and testing on production lines.

NVIDIA’s Deepu Talla says integrating Omniverse accelerates simulation and accelerated computing, helping manufacturers bring complex products to market faster.

ABB Robotics teams with NVIDIA to close the sim-to-real gap by embedding NVIDIA Omniverse libraries into ABB’s RobotStudio, enabling high-fidelity simulation and synthetic data for virtual training before deployment.

A pilot program with Foxconn will test the full range of industrial applications and real-world deployment in consumer electronics assembly.

The launch is planned for the second half of 2026, with select customers already testing capabilities ahead of a global rollout to ABB’s 60,000 RobotStudio users.

The partnership is pitched to deliver faster time-to-market, lower production costs, and scalable, AI-driven manufacturing capabilities.

RobotStudio HyperReality promises to accelerate product development, cut setup times up to 80%, reduce costs by about 40%, enable concurrent engineering without physical prototypes, and speed time-to-market for complex products by roughly half.

A stamping-machine-adjacent robot example illustrates virtual training preparing systems to handle vibrations without extensive physical prototyping.

Longer-term outlook envisions global industrial deployment by 2027, continuous real-world data feedback refining models, and broader digital twin use cases, with pilots showing scalable physical AI despite environment diversity.

ABB Robotics President emphasizes the partnership as a step toward making industrial and physical AI a worldwide reality.