Nvidia-backed Skild AI teaches robots new tasks from a single video

Skild, a startup developing general-purpose physical AI, is using Nvidia technology to create a robot foundation model that can learn new tasks from a single video.

The project is part of a broader industry push toward general-purpose robots, with researchers and developers seeking ways to train physical AI systems more quickly and move them from laboratory demonstrations to real-world deployments.

S1 foundation model

The Pittsburgh-based company said its robot foundation model is designed to learn previously unseen, multistep tasks from a single video demonstration.

The technology is already being deployed at an Nvidia factory in Houston, where Skild, Nvidia and contract electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn recently began using the Skild Brain omni-bodied foundation model on dual-arm robots to assemble Nvidia Blackwell GPU systems.

S1 was built on Nvidia AI infrastructure, using Cosmos, Isaac Lab, Isaac Sim and Omniverse across data generation, training, simulation and deployment. The model can also adjust when objects move, recover from errors and combine skills in sequences it was not explicitly programmed to perform.

Skild reached a $100 million annual revenue run rate earlier this month, just 10 months after its first commercial deployment. This, according to the company, is evidence that robot foundation models are moving beyond demos and into real work.

“S1 shows how quickly an operator could teach a robot new work,” Amit Goel, director of product management for autonomous machines at Nvidia, told TechTarget.com. “For manufacturers, the opportunity is to make automation more adaptable as products, components and processes change.”

In one experiment, Skild reported just 11 minutes elapsed between recording a plant-potting demonstration and the robot performing the task autonomously.

For the deployment building Blackwell systems, Goel said the project demonstrates the value of adaptable robot intelligence in a concrete manufacturing application.