Nvidia builds new AI platform to give robots better brains

Nvidia has announced the general availability of its Isaac platform designed to bring the futuristic world of robots for manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, construction and other industries.

The platform was launched at Computex 2018, includes hardware, software and a virtual-world robot simulator, as well as Jetson Xavier, which Nvidia claim’s is world’s first computer designed specifically for robotics.

“AI is the most powerful technology force of our time,” said CEO Jensen Huang. “Its first phase will enable new levels of software automation that boost productivity in many industries. Next, AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines. Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more.”

Looking specifically of Jetson Xavier, the box contains 9 billion transistors, delivering more than trillion operations per second, while using a third the energy of a lightbulb. Jetson Xavier has six kinds of high-performance processors, including a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, dual NVDLA deep learning accelerators, an image processor, a vision processor and a video processor. This level of performance is critical due to the complexity of robotics with processes such as sensor processing, odometry, localization and mapping, vision and perception, and path planning.

On the Isaac Robotics Software side of things, Nvidia has billed the platform as a ‘toolbox’ for the simulation, training, verification and deployment of Jetson Xavier. The robotics software consists of Isaac SDK, APIs and tools to develop robotics algorithm software, Isaac IMX, the platforms Intelligent Machine Acceleration applications and Isaac Sim, a virtual simulation environment for training.

Nvidia will have a lot to live up for with these announcements. Aside from making big promises to a segment of artificial intelligence which has struggled to make progress, the team has stated the $1,299 box will have the same processing power as a $10,000 workstation.