Add v0.2 release notes for GTC.

docs/README.md

@@ -17,15 +17,16 @@ From the repo root, create the venv and install dependencies:
 ```bash
 cd docs
 python3.11 -m venv venv_docs
-venv_docs/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
+source venv_docs/bin/activate
+pip install -r requirements.txt
 ```
 
 
-## Build and view
+## Build and view (current branch/changes)
 
 ```bash
 cd docs
-venv_docs/bin/sphinx-build -M html . _build/current
+make html
 xdg-open _build/current/html/index.html
 ```
 

docs/conf.py

@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@
 # from setup import ISAACLAB_ARENA_VERSION_NUMBER
 
 # TODO(alexmillane, 2025-10-03): Get this programmatically, as above.
-ISAACLAB_ARENA_VERSION_NUMBER = "0.1"
+ISAACLAB_ARENA_VERSION_NUMBER = "0.2"
 
 
 # Modify PYTHONPATH so we can import the helpers module.

docs/pages/references/release_notes.rst

@@ -1,6 +1,141 @@
 Release Notes
 =============
 
+Unreleased: v0.2.0
+------------------
+
+This release of Isaac Lab-Arena focuses on adding essential features needed for creation and
+execution of large-scale task libraries with complex long-horizon tasks.
+
+.. note::
+
+  Changes on ``main`` contains an in development version of v0.2.0.
+  As of March 16th 2026 (GTC San Jose 2026), ``main`` contains most of the features for the v0.2.0 release,
+  however, is based on Isaac Lab 2.3 (rather than Isaac Lab 3.0) and has not been SQA tested.*
+
+**Key Features**
+
+- **LEGO-like Composable Environments** — Mix and match scenes,  embodiments, and tasks independently
+- **On-the-fly Assembly** — Environments are built at runtime; no duplicate config files to maintain.
+- **New Sequential Task Chaining** — Chain atomic skills (e.g. Pick + Walk + Place + …) to create complex long-horizon tasks.
+- **New Natural Language Object Placement** — Define scene layouts using semantic relationships
+  like "on" or "next to", instead of manually specified coordinates.
+- **Integrated Evaluation** — Extensible metrics and evaluation pipelines for policy benchmarking
+- **New Large-scale Parallel Evaluations with Heterogeneous Objects** — Evaluate policy on multiple parallel
+  environments, each with different objects, to maximize evaluation throughput.
+- **New RL Workflow Support and Seamless Interoperation with Isaac Lab** — Plug Isaac Lab-Arena environments
+  into Isaac Lab workflows for Reinforcement learning and Data generation for imitation learning.
+
+
+**Ecosystem**
+NVIDIA and partners are building Industrial and academic benchmarks on the unified Isaac Lab-Arena core,
+so you can reuse LEGO blocks (tasks, scenes, metrics, and datasets) for your custom evaluations.
+
+- `Lightwheel RoboFinals <https://lightwheel.ai/robofinals>`_ — high fidelity industrial benchmarks
+- `Lightwheel RoboCasa Tasks <https://github.com/LightwheelAI/LW-BenchHub>`_ — 138+ open-source tasks,
+  50 datasets per task, 7+ robots
+- `Lightwheel LIBERO Tasks <https://github.com/LightwheelAI/LW-BenchHub>`_ — Adapted LIBERO benchmarks
+- `RoboTwin 2.0 <https://github.com/RoboTwin-Platform/RoboTwin/tree/IsaacLab-Arena>`_ — Extended simulation
+  benchmarks using Arena (`arxiv <https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.08164>`_)
+- `LeRobot Environment Hub <https://huggingface.co/blog/nvidia/generalist-robotpolicy-eval-isaaclab-arena-lerobot>`_ — Share
+  and discover Arena environments on Hugging Face
+- **Coming Soon:** NIST Board 1, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Industrial Benchmarks, NVIDIA DexBench, NVIDIA RoboLab, and more.
+
+
+**Developer preview branches**
+
+- **A developer preview of Isaac Lab-Arena 0.2 (based on Isaac Lab 2.3) is now available** on
+  `main <https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLab-Arena/tree/main>`_.
+  This early version includes the 0.2 features and is meant for users who can accept some instability.
+- **Isaac Lab-Arena 0.2 on Isaac Lab 3.0 is underway in a dedicated feature branch**
+  `feature/isaac_lab_3_newton <https://github.com/isaac-sim/IsaacLab-Arena/tree/feature/isaac_lab_3_newton>`_.
+  This branch is subject to significant changes and instability as Lab 3.0 (Newton) is evolving quickly.
+- **The official, stable, and tested release of Isaac Lab-Arena 0.2 on Isaac Lab 3.0 is coming soon in April 2026.**
+
+
+**Collaboration**
+
+Isaac Lab-Arena is being developed as an open-source, shared evaluation framework that the community can
+collectively enhance and expand. We invite you to try Isaac Lab-Arena 0.2 Alpha, share feedback, and help
+shape its future. In Alpha stage, development velocity is high and core features/APIs are evolving. Your
+input at this stage is especially valuable.
+
+**What's Next**
+
+Future releases will focus on agentic, prompt-first scene and task generation, non-sequential long horizon
+tasks, easy-to-configure sensitivity analysis with targeted environment variations and evaluation sweeps without
+code changes, enhanced heterogeneity across parallel evaluations, and VLM-augmented analysis to surface
+insights from large-scale evaluations. These will come with ongoing improvements to performance and usability,
+such as PIP packaging.
+
+**Limitations**
+
+- pip install support is coming soon (current installation method is Docker-based).
+- Performance is not yet hardened for production-scale workloads in Alpha stage.
+
+
+
+
+v0.1.1
+------
+
+This release includes bug fixes, documentation improvements, CI and infrastructure
+updates, and several API and workflow enhancements over v0.1.0.
+
+**Features and improvements**
+
+- **Object configuration:** Object configuration is now created as soon as an asset is
+  called, so users can edit object properties before a scene is created (#239).
+- **Scene export:** Added support for saving a scene to a flattened USD file (#237).
+  Scene export now correctly handles double-precision poses and adds contact reporters
+  when exporting rigid objects (#242).
+- **Parallel environment evaluation:** Enabled parallel environment evaluation for
+  GR00T policy runner, with documentation for closed-loop GR00T workflows (#231, #236).
+- **Episode length:** Increased episode length for loco-manipulation to support
+  rollout through box drop (#235).
+- **Microwave example:** Increased reset openness for the microwave example (#311).
+
+**Bug fixes**
+
+- **Reference object poses:** Fixed reference object poses so they correctly account
+  for the parent object’s initial pose; poses are now relative and composed at compile
+  time (#232).
+- **IsaacLab-to-stage path conversion:** Fixed a bug when the asset name appeared twice
+  in the prim path (replaced both instances instead of one) (#241).
+- **qpsolvers:** Patched breakage with Isaac Lab 2.3 due to ``qpsolvers`` upgrade by
+  pinning to 4.8.1 (#252).
+- **Parallel eval:** Removed comments that were breaking the parallel eval run
+  commands (#262).
+
+**Documentation**
+
+- **Multi-versioned docs:** Documentation is now versioned so users can read docs that
+  match their release (#272, #300).
+- **Links and structure:** Updated README docs link to the public location (#270),
+  corrected doc pointers (#301), and added release warnings (#303).
+- **Installation:** Private Omniverse/Nucleus access is described on a separate page
+  to clarify it is not required for normal installation (#261).
+
+**Infrastructure and CI**
+
+- **Runners:** Release 0.1.1 CI runners moved from local (Zurich) to AWS (#433).
+- **CI workflow:** Added YAML anchors to reduce repetition in the CI workflow (#245).
+- **Contribution guide:** Added signoff requirements for external contributions (#238).
+- **Docker:** Fixed Dockerfile pip usage and added SSL certificate support for
+  Lightwheel SDK (#449).
+- **Tests:** Finetuned GR00T locomanip model is now generated on the fly in tests
+  instead of mounting a pre-finetuned models directory, improving public CI
+  compatibility and testing the fine-tuning pipeline (#247).
+
+**Assets and tests**
+
+- **G1 WBC:** Updated G1 WBC embodiment file paths to use S3 (#251).
+- **Test assets:** Removed internal or custom-only assets from tests: custom cracker
+  box (#234), custom USD in ObjectReference test (#240), internal asset from USD
+  utils test (#244). ObjectReference test now composes USD on the fly via scene
+  export (#240).
+
+
 v0.1.0
 ------