Combining Nvidia’s Omniverse and Siemens’ Xcelerator enables ‘full-fidelity digital twins’
Nvidia and Siemens have announced a collaboration that the two businesses promise will transform the manufacturing industry. The collaboration pairs Nvidia’s Omniverse and Siemens’ newly announced Xcelerator platforms together to “bring industrial automation to a new level.” Siemens’ physics-based digital models and Nvidia’s real-time artificial intelligence (AI) processing are at the heart of the new team up.
Nvidia’s Omniverse is the company’s metaverse play. What started out as a collaborative 3D design environment with real-world physics modeling has evolved into a training environment for industrial automation. Last fall, Ericsson and Nvidia announced a digital twin collaboration. Nvidia said that Ericsson is building virtual versions of real cities using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform, to figure out optimal real-world antenna placement.
Now, Nvidia underscores Omniverse as the software backbone driving the next generation of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Omniverse has emerged as a way for enterprises to train AI through simulation — putting systems in tests over and over and over, so they’ll run with fewer complications and recover from failures with less human intervention once they’re deployed in the real world.
Siemens is offering enterprises Xcelerator as a platform to accelerate their digital transformation efforts. Described as “an open digital business platform,” specific services offered include a curated portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled hardware, software, digital services from Siemens and third parties, and a marketplace ecosystem to draw together customers, partners, and developers.
Siemens is launching with Xcelerator a new Software as a Service (SaaS) platform called Building X, which it hopes will help enterprises reach net-zero goals. The company’s recently announced acquisition of Brightly Software, a building asset and maintenance management software firm, figures…well, brightly, if you’ll pardon the pun, in this new offering.
“It is an end-to-end data and analytics suite breaking down data silos across domains such as energy management, security and building maintenance. Building X is a modular, fully cloud-based open software suite, with AI enabled applications, strong connectivity and built-in cybersecurity,” said Siemens.
Back to Nvidia and Siemens’ collaboration, the two companies promise that their new effort will enable more enterprise scalability of the digital twin concept.
“Photorealistic, physics-based digital twins embedded in the industrial metaverse offer enormous potential to transform our economies and industries by providing a virtual world where people can interact and collaborate to solve real-world problems. Through this partnership, we will make the industrial metaverse a reality for companies of all sizes,” said Roland Busch, president and chief executive officer, Siemens AG.
