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SAN JOSE, Calif. — The NVIDIA GTC 2024 keynote kicked off like a rock live performance yesterday on the SAP Area. Greater than 15,000 attendees stuffed the sector in anticipation of CEO Jensen Huang’s annual presentation of the most recent product information from NVIDIA.
To construct the thrill, the ready crowd was mesmerized by an interactive and real-time generative artwork show operating dwell on the principle stage display, pushed by the prompts of artist Refik Anadol Dustio.
New basis for humanoid robotics
The massive information from the robotics aspect of the home is that NVIDIA launched a brand new general-purpose basis mannequin for humanoid robots referred to as Challenge GR00T. This new mannequin is designed to convey robotics and embodied AI collectively whereas enabling the robots to grasp pure language and emulate actions by observing human actions.
GR00T stands for “Generalist Robotic 00 Know-how,” and with the race for humanoid robotics heating up, this new know-how is meant to assist speed up improvement. GR00T is a big multimodal mannequin (LMM) offering robotics builders with a generative AI platform to start the implementation of huge language fashions (LLMs).
“Constructing basis fashions for basic humanoid robots is likely one of the most fun issues to unravel in AI right this moment,” mentioned Huang. “The enabling applied sciences are coming collectively for main roboticists around the globe to take big leaps in the direction of synthetic basic robotics.”
GR00T makes use of the brand new Jetson Thor
As a part of its robotics bulletins, NVIDIA unveiled Jetson Thor for humanoid robots, based mostly on the NVIDIA Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC). Important upgrades to the NVIDIA Isaac robotics platform embrace generative AI basis fashions and instruments for simulation and AI workflow infrastructure.
The Thor SoC features a next-generation GPU based mostly on NVIDIA Blackwell structure with a transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating-point AI efficiency. With an built-in purposeful security processor, a high-performance CPU cluster, and 100GB of Ethernet bandwidth, it may possibly simplify design and integration efforts, claimed the corporate.
NVIDIA confirmed humanoids in improvement with its applied sciences from firms together with 1X Applied sciences, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Determine AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics, and XPENG Robotics.
“We’re at an inflection level in historical past, with human-centric robots like Digit poised to alter labor perpetually,” mentioned Jonathan Hurst, co-founder and chief robotic officer at Agility Robotics. “Fashionable AI will speed up improvement, paving the best way for robots like Digit to assist individuals in all elements of every day life.”
“We’re excited to companion with NVIDIA to spend money on the computing, simulation instruments, machine studying environments, and different obligatory infrastructure to allow the dream of robots being part of every day life,” he mentioned.
NVIDIA updates Isaac simulation platform
The Isaac instruments that GR00T makes use of are able to creating new basis fashions for any robotic embodiment in any setting, in keeping with NVIDIA. Amongst these instruments are Isaac Lab for reinforcement studying, and OSMO, a compute orchestration service.
Embodied AI fashions require huge quantities of actual and artificial information. The brand new Isaac Lab is a GPU-accelerated, light-weight, performance-optimized utility constructed on Isaac Sim for operating hundreds of parallel simulations for robotic studying.
To scale robotic improvement workloads throughout heterogeneous compute, OSMO coordinates the info era, mannequin coaching, and software program/hardware-in-the-loop workflows throughout distributed environments.
NVIDIA additionally introduced Isaac Manipulator and Isaac Perceptor — a group of robotics-pretrained fashions, libraries and reference {hardware}.
Isaac Manipulator presents dexterity and modular AI capabilities for robotic arms, with a strong assortment of basis fashions and GPU-accelerated libraries. It may speed up path planning by as much as 80x, and zero-shot notion will increase effectivity and throughput, enabling builders to automate a larger variety of new robotic duties, mentioned NVIDIA.
Amongst early ecosystem companions are Franka Robotics, PickNik Robotics, READY Robotics, Solomon, Common Robots, a Teradyne firm, and Yaskawa.
Isaac Perceptor gives multi-camera, 3D surround-vision capabilities, that are more and more being utilized in autonomous cellular robots (AMRs) adopted in manufacturing and success operations to enhance effectivity and employee security. NVIDIA listed firms similar to ArcBest, BYD, and KION Group as companions.
Study from Agility Robotics, Amazon, Disney, Teradyne and plenty of extra.
‘Simulation first’ is the brand new mantra for NVIDIA
A simulation-first method is ushering within the subsequent part of automation. Actual-time AI is now a actuality in manufacturing, manufacturing facility logistics, and robotics. These environments are complicated, typically involving lots of or hundreds of shifting components. Till now, it was a monumental job to simulate all of those shifting components.
NVIDIA has mixed software program similar to Omniverse, Metropolis, Isaac, and cuOpt to create an “AI fitness center” the place robots and AI brokers can work out and be evaluated in complicated industrial areas.
Huang demonstrated a digital twin of a 100,000-sq.-ft, warehouse — constructed utilizing the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for growing and connecting OpenUSD purposes — working as a simulation setting for dozens of digital employees and a number of AMRs, imaginative and prescient AI brokers, and sensors.
Every cellular robotic, operating the NVIDIA Isaac Perceptor multi-sensor stack, can course of visible data from six sensors, all simulated within the digital twin.
On the similar time, the NVIDIA Metropolis platform for imaginative and prescient AI can create a single centralized map of employee exercise throughout the complete warehouse, fusing information from 100 simulated ceiling-mounted digital camera streams with multi-camera monitoring. This centralized occupancy map might help inform optimum AMR routes calculated by the NVIDIA cuOpt engine for fixing complicated routing issues.
cuOpt, an optimization AI microservice, solves complicated routing issues with a number of constraints utilizing GPU-accelerated evolutionary algorithms.
All of this occurs in real-time, whereas Isaac Mission Management coordinates the complete fleet utilizing map information and route graphs from cuOpt to ship and execute AMR instructions.
NVIDIA DRIVE Thor for robotic axis
The corporate additionally introduced NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which now supersedes NVIDIA DRIVE Orin as a SoC for autonomous driving purposes.
A number of autonomous automobiles are utilizing NVIDA architectures, together with robotaxis and autonomous supply automobiles from firms together with Nuro, Xpeng, Weride, Plus, and BYD.