C-Lab Clinches First Place in NVIDIA’s Physical AI Competition

Physical artificial intelligence (AI) specialist C-Lab announced on September 9 that it secured first place in Track 4 (text-based abnormal person search) of the global computer vision competition ‘2026 AI City Challenge’ hosted by NVIDIA, and received an award at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026).

The field in which C-Lab achieved results is directly related to physical AI. Physical AI refers to AI that recognizes and operates within physical spaces such as factories, logistics centers, and cities. Typical applications include robotics, autonomous driving, and industrial automation systems.

Physical AI is highly dependent on physics-based simulations and synthetic data generation. However, the “sim-to-real gap,” which occurs when AI models trained in virtual environments perform poorly in real-world scenarios, has been highlighted as a key challenge for commercialization.

In Track 4, models trained solely on approximately 1.01 million synthetic images released by the organizer were evaluated with real video footage. The organizer defined this competition as a benchmark for ‘intelligent transportation, smart cities, and physical AI,’ explicitly stating that synthetic-to-real transfer learning was at its core.

C-Lab plans to integrate the technology showcased in this competition into its vision AI and digital twin businesses. By utilizing established digital twins as the foundation for generating vision AI training data, the company offers the full process of twin construction, synthetic data generation, model training, and field deployment as an integrated flow.

Yujin Song, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of C-Lab, stated, “C-Lab’s AI technology, which enables the application of virtual data to field environments, has now been validated,” adding, “Going forward, we will lead the adoption of physical AI in real-world operation sites by blending virtual and field data.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.