Nvidia and PassiveLogic Team Up to Drive Integration for Autonomous Buildings

Nvidia has invested $15 million in PassiveLogic, a pioneer in autonomous building management systems. The investment will help drive integration between PassiveLogic’s tools and Nvidia’s Omniverse platform for the industrial metaverse.

PassiveLogic is developing a growing ecosystem of tools built on top of digital twins to enable next-generation generative design, autonomous systems and artificial intelligence (AI). These help architects, engineers, contractors and building owners improve efficiency and reduce the cost of construction activities.

The platform helps users quickly collaborate around AI controls, test them on digital twins of the building, and then deploy them in operations. The company claims its Hive control platform is ten times faster to install and reduces energy consumption by a third compared to conventional automation solutions.

PassiveLogic is also the driving force behind the quantum digital twin standard for autonomous systems that helps describe system-level interactions between components, equipment, assemblies, and environments.

Visualization meets automation

According to Troy Harvey, CEO of PassiveLogic, “Nvidia’s Omniverse and PassiveLogic’s Quantum are each focused on different and complementary aspects of describing the world through digital twins.”

The Omniverse is very much focused on geometry and visualization and offers integration with Universal Scene Description (USD) workflows for industrial digital twins. PassiveLogic’s compiler and compute technology runs the AI ​​for this digital twin on the edge of Nvidia GPU technology. Integration between the platforms makes it easier to embed digital twins in AI control systems to support autonomous building controls that can adapt to changes in user needs, the environment or the equipment itself.

“As a partnership, we are very excited about the wide range of applications that our combined technology platforms can handle,” said Harvey.

Other components of the PassiveLogic platform include:

• The Quantum Creator that provides a CAD system for creating digital twins that describe what something is, how it works, and why it would perform specific actions.
• An Autonomy Studio that allows users to build autonomous systems by assembling digital twins in systems and environments through a drag-and-drop interface that performs a system-level digital twin.
• The Hive platform uses these digital twins to provide real-time building automation.
• The Passport feature allows individuals to create and share their own personal digital twin that reflects physiological, ergonomic and comfort preferences.

New Workflows

These integrations can improve operating systems for all types of equipment. In the short term, Harvey focuses most on opportunities for autonomous buildings to improve sustainability. He estimates that buildings use about 41% of the world’s energy and believes the company’s platform can help reduce that by 30%.

PassiveLogic can help teams at the beginning of a project clarify project goals, iterate prototypes with generative design, and then automate control systems. Nvidia’s Omniverse then takes care of the visualization, animation, and 3D exploration of the virtual world once the project gets underway. Omniverse also simplifies USD integration with other tools.

Nvidia’s new funding brings PassiveLogic’s total funding to more than $80 million. Other investors include building owners, equipment manufacturers and venture capitalists such as Addition, Brookfield, Keyframe, RET, Era and A/O Proptech. This investment is part of a broader trend of using USD as a core data layer to simplify workflows for various tools. It complements efforts to integrate USD and IFC and Nvidia’s recent partnership with Siemens to grow the industrial metaverse on top of USD.