Installation

Installing the Newton physics integration branch requires three things:

1. The feature/newton branch of Isaac Lab

2. Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 (Windows will be supported soon)

3. [Optional] Isaac sim 5.1 (Isaac Sim is not required if the Omniverse visualizer is not used)

To begin, verify the version of Isaac Sim by checking the title of the window created when launching the simulation app. Alternatively, you can find more explicit version information under the Help -> About menu within the app. If your version is less than 5.1, you must first update or reinstall Isaac Sim before you can proceed further.

Next, navigate to the root directory of your local copy of the Isaac Lab repository and open a terminal.

Make sure we are on the feature/newton branch by running the following command:

git checkout feature/newton

Below, we provide instructions for installing Isaac Sim through pip.

Pip Installation

We recommend using conda for managing your python environments. Conda can be downloaded and installed from here.

If you previously already have a virtual environment for Isaac Lab, please ensure to start from a fresh environment to avoid any dependency conflicts. If you have installed earlier versions of mujoco, mujoco-warp, or newton packages through pip, we recommend first cleaning your pip cache with pip cache purge to remove any cache of earlier versions that may be conflicting with the latest.

Create a new conda environment:

conda create -n env_isaaclab python=3.11

Activate the environment:

conda activate env_isaaclab

Install the correct version of torch and torchvision:

pip install -U torch==2.7.0 torchvision==0.22.0 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

[Optional] Install Isaac Sim 5.1:

pip install "isaacsim[all,extscache]==5.1.0" --extra-index-url https://pypi.nvidia.com

Install Isaac Lab extensions and dependencies:

./isaaclab.sh -i

Testing the Installation

To verify that the installation was successful, run the following command from the root directory of your Isaac Lab repository:

./isaaclab.sh -p scripts/environments/zero_agent.py --task Isaac-Cartpole-Direct-v0 --num_envs 128

Note that since Newton requires a more recent version of Warp than Isaac Sim 5.1, there may be some incompatibility issues that could result in errors such as ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'warp.sim'. These are ok to ignore and should not impact usability.