Retrieving news from NVIDIA at GTC 2024 last night, beyond the Blackwell GPU and GB200 server, there are several other new products as well. Particularly intriguing is the release of humanoid robots with 3 offerings at once: the Jetson Thor board, the upgraded Isaac robotics platform, and the basic model for creating the GR00T humanoid robot.
NVIDIA’s objective is to create a platform that allows us to train robots to mimic human gestures. This involves recording human movements and then training in a simulated environment until confident, before implementing on actual robots.
On the hardware side, the Jetson Thor board is a new upgrade from the Jetson Orin model of 2023, featuring the new Thor SoC chip with the Blackwell architecture GPU boasting 800 TFLOPS (FP8), a high-performance CPU with unspecified specs, and Ethernet 100GB.
On the software front, NVIDIA’s robotics platform called Isaac, established in 2018, has been significantly upgraded this year with 4 new additions:
– Isaac Lab for faster robot learning in the simulator.
– NVIDIA OSMO for workflow orchestration on the cloud.
– Isaac Manipulator for developing robotic arms.
– Isaac Perceptor for enhancing a robot’s vision system with multiple cameras.
Finally, there is Project GR00T, which stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology, serving as a foundation model for robots to learn various tasks. Robotics companies can easily develop specialized applications using GR00T, with many already announcing collaborations, like 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics, and XPENG Robotics.
TLDR: NVIDIA unveiled new products at GTC 2024, including humanoid robots and upgraded platforms for training and development.
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