Installation

Installing the Newton physics integration requires three things:

1. The develop branch of Isaac Lab

2. Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04

3. [Optional] Isaac Sim 6.0 (Isaac Sim is not required if the Omniverse visualizer is not used)

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

Make sure we are on the develop branch by running the following command:

git checkout develop

Installation

We recommend using uv as the package manager — it is significantly faster than pip and conda. To install uv, please follow the instructions 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 virtual environment with Python 3.12:

uv venv --python 3.12 --seed env_isaaclab

Activate the environment:

source env_isaaclab/bin/activate

Note

If you are using pip directly instead of uv pip, replace uv pip with pip in the commands below.

Ensure pip is up to date:

uv pip install --upgrade pip

[Optional] Install Isaac Sim 6.0:

uv pip install "isaacsim[all,extscache]==6.0.0" --extra-index-url https://pypi.nvidia.com

Install the correct version of torch and torchvision:

uv pip install -U torch==2.10.0 torchvision==0.25.0 --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu128

Install Isaac Lab extensions and dependencies (this includes Newton 1.0):

./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