Physical AI for Intralogistics: Benchmarking the NVIDIA Sim-to-Real Ecosystem for Cosmos-Enhanced COMPASS Navigation on Industrial Mobile Robots

Overview & Synopsis

Classical robot navigation stacks are reliable but often require re-engineering for each new robot type and site. Learning-based navigation shifts this effort from hand-tuned parameters to data generation and training, where a policy adapts to each new embodiment or facility by fine-tuning in simulation. Whether policies adapted this way stay reliable on real industrial robots has seen little systematic testing. We study this for NVIDIA's X-Mobility and COMPASS workflow for training learned navigation policies on Idealworks robots. In simulation, we extend the COMPASS benchmark with two embodiments, the differential-drive iw$\mkern-1.5mu.\mkern-1.5mu$hub and an omnidirectional Humanoid Mobile Platform (HMP), and with a digital twin of the Idealworks R&D center. For the real world, we fine-tune X-Mobility on data from this digital twin, with and without sim-to-real variants generated by NVIDIA Cosmos, train COMPASS on top of it from scratch in the digital twin, deploy the resulting policies on the iw$\mkern-1.5mu.\mkern-1.5mu$hub's onboard Jetson AGX Xavier, and benchmark them in the Idealworks R&D center against COMPASS trained only on NVIDIA's environments and the existing Idealworks navigation stack on task success, efficiency, safety, smoothness and onboard compute. Running every static scenario both in a digital-twin replica and in the real facility measures the sim-to-real gap and how far Cosmos-augmented data closes it. Training in the digital twin with Cosmos sim-to-real augmentation raises the real-world success rate of learned navigation from 65.3% to 91.7% across four scenarios and nearly halves its weighted travel time compared with simulation-only training, bringing it within 8.3 points of the production navigation stack, fully onboard; with an integrated global planner, it also reaches far, occluded goals in every trial.