YOKOHAMA, Japan & SANTA CLARA, Calif. – FANUC, the world's leading provider of factory robots and automation systems, has announced a landmark partnership with NVIDIA to integrate advanced artificial intelligence into its robotic platforms. This collaboration aims to bring "physical AI"—the ability for robots to perceive, reason, and interact with the physical world—into mainstream manufacturing, promising to reshape the future of smart factories.

The strategic alliance will see FANUC’s extensive portfolio of industrial robots integrated with NVIDIA’s powerful AI computing stack. This includes on-robot systems like the NVIDIA Jetson platform for real-time data processing and the NVIDIA Isaac Sim simulation platform for creating highly realistic virtual environments.

In a significant move to broaden its ecosystem, FANUC has also released support for the open-source Robotics Operating System (ROS 2). This allows developers, researchers, and companies to program robots using Python, a widely accessible language, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for building sophisticated, AI-driven applications on FANUC’s renowned industrial hardware.

Building Smarter Factories with Digital Twins

A key component of the partnership is the creation of high-fidelity digital twins. Using NVIDIA’s simulation and physics-aware AI frameworks, manufacturers can build virtual replicas of their entire factory floors and robot fleets. Within these virtual environments, companies can train, test, and optimize AI models and robotic workflows before deploying them on the physical factory floor. This approach minimizes risk, reduces downtime, and ensures a more efficient and accurate rollout of advanced automation.

A New Era of Flexibility and Intelligence

This collaboration directly addresses a major limitation of traditional factory automation. Historically, robots have been pre-programmed for rigid, repetitive tasks. Adapting production lines to new products or processes often required costly and time-consuming manual reprogramming, leading to significant downtime.

The FANUC-NVIDIA partnership promises to replace this rigid model with intelligent, adaptive automation. By embedding AI, perception, and real-time reasoning, robots can:

• Interpret dynamic environments: Understand and react to changes on the factory floor.
• Respond to human commands: Accept voice or gesture-based instructions, simplifying human-robot interaction.
• Work safely alongside humans: Collaborate with human operators without the need for extensive safety cages.

For the manufacturing sector, particularly in regions like the UK facing shifting supply chains and production demands, the implications are profound. AI-enabled robots will allow for existing production lines to be retrofitted for new tasks rather than overhauled, enabling rapid switching between product variants and boosting overall operational agility. The open nature of ROS 2 and Python is also expected to stimulate a new wave of innovation, allowing firms to leverage their own software expertise to customize solutions.

Demonstrating the Future

FANUC plans to showcase robots equipped with this new physical AI capability at key global trade shows in the near future. These demonstrations will feature real-world use cases, including voice-controlled operation, adaptive motion control in unstructured environments, and virtual commissioning within digital twins.

For automation industry stakeholders—from integrators and system designers to manufacturers and policymakers—this partnership marks the beginning of a new chapter. It signals a shift from simply faster machines to a new class of intelligent, flexible, and collaborative automation systems poised to define the next generation of industrial excellence.