Noble Machines and Schaeffler collaborate to advance general-purpose robots’ realism with Newton
Sunnyvale, California — March 10, 2026 — Noble Machines is working together with Schaeffler to design and integrate the high-performance actuators for Noble Machines’ platform. These actuators, powered by Texas Instruments chipsets, provide the precision required for complex general-purpose robot motion.
To accelerate development, Noble Machines and Schaeffler are bringing a high-fidelity digital twin of this actuator platform into Newton, an open-source physics engine built on NVIDIA Warp and Open USD. This allows Noble Machines to combine physically realistic actuator models with its state of the art sim-to-real deployment pipeline to further enhance whole body control policies before hardware deployment.
Overcoming the Sim-to-Real Gap While traditional simulations often assume "perfect" hardware, real-world actuators experience friction, wear, and manufacturing variances. By using Schaeffler’s physically realistic models within Newton, Noble Machines can account for:
- Manufacturing Variability: Model unit-to-unit differences to ensure robust performance across a robot fleet.
- Predictive Aging: Simulate performance degradation from lubricant breakdown and seal wear.
- Energy Realism: Predict energy consumption that can be up to 10x higher than idealized models suggest.
- Dynamic Precision:Utilize realistic feedforward compensation to reduce tracking errors by up to 68%.
Intelligent "Learning-on-the-Job" The collaboration also enables online self-diagnosis. By turning controller effort into an identification signal, Noble Machines’ general-purpose robots can identify internal parameter changes in real-time, allowing them to autonomously compensate for wear or environmental drift.
"Working with Schaeffler and utilizing NVIDIA's simulation technology allows us to quickly iterate on our whole body control technology despite the complexity of physical actuators," said Wei Ding, Co-founder and CEO of Noble Machines. "This collaboration greatly enhances our sim-to-real deployment pipeline to achieve human-like precision while minimizing the time and resources of development."
About Noble Machines
Noble Machines is the leader in general-purpose robots for hazardous and physically demanding tasks in industry. Noble Machines’ AI-driven whole-body control and end-to-end autonomy accelerate learning of new skills while providing the stability and intelligence required for industrial operations. Noble Machines enables customers to redefine the future of work, making work safer, more efficient, and more productive for people in manufacturing, construction, logistics, and energy. Noble Machines was founded in 2024. Learn more at noblemachines.ai.