Nvidia has been a big proponent of GPU computing to power AI and driverless cars, but only now is Nvidia introducing its own dedicated robotics platform.
At Computex 2018 the company announced a new Isaac platform to power the next generation of autonomous machines. It includes new hardware, software and a virtual-world robot simulator to introduce artificial intelligence capabilities to robots for manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, construction and other industries.
Alongside Isaac, Jensen Huang, President and CEO of Nvidia, introduced Jetson Xavier as the single biggest robotics project Nvidia has worked on for years. Heralded as the brand’s first ever computer designed specifically for robotics, it combines 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.
Nvidia claims Jetson Xavier is equipped with more than nine billion transistors designed to perform over 30 trillion operations per second. Huang said Nvidia’s new robotics computer is more powerful than Nvidia Titan Xp and a $10,000 workstation, all while only needing 30 watts to operate.
Priced at a relatively affordable $1,299 (about £970, AU$1,700) as part of a Jetson Xavier Devkit, it could help power the next generation of robotics well beyond autonomous cars. Early access for the Jetson Xavier Devkit will begin in August.
- Catch up with everything happening at Computex 2018
