After having made a name for itself in the AI chip industry. Nvidia is planning to disrupt another futuristic industry, Robotics. The global chip-making giant has shown interest in robotics and plans to enter it soon. The company is expected to launch its very first compact computer for humanoid robots, dubbed Jetson Thor.
With this, Nvidia is trying to position itself as a leading platform for the imminent robotic revolution. The company plans to sell a “full-stack” solution for robotics’, from software to the machinery that go into them. Growing concerns fuel this rush to enter the robotics world as competitors like Microsoft, AMD, and Amazon are getting neck-to-neck more than ever before.
The main goal of Nvidia here is to bridge the Sim-to-Real gap of robotics, ensuring robots trained in virtual environments can translate that training efficiently in the real world. Nvidia’s vice president for robotics, Deepu Talla, said, “In the past 12 months [this gap] has matured sufficiently that we can now carry out experiments in simulation, combining with generative AI, that we could not do two years ago. We provide the platform for enabling all of these companies to do any of those tasks.”
As a result, Nvidia will provide a three-stage robotics development plan: Software for training foundational models, training in simulations of real-world environments on its Omniverse and hardware to go inside the brain of the humanoid robot.
However, many experts believe that robotics is still not a very promising field, citing problems with scaling, reducing costs and increasing the accuracy of AI development. David Rose, Lead at Northeastern University’s Autonomy Lab, said, “As of right now, we don’t have very effective tools for verifying the safety and reliability properties of machine learning systems, especially in robotics. This is a major open scientific question in the field.”
