Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said: “For GMHumanoid RobotBuilding the underlying model is one of the most exciting challenges in artificial intelligence today. " Humanoid robots are one of the hottest topics in the field of robotics today, attracting a lot of venture capital on the one hand, but also arousing huge doubts on the other.
NVIDIA will certainly not miss this piece of cake. As a well-deserved hardware giant in the field of artificial intelligence, NVIDIA has been promoting robot innovation through projects such as Isaac and Jetson. At the annual GTC developer conference held today, NVIDIA announced that it would Project GR00T(Generalist Robot 00 Technology) project officially entered the field of humanoid robots.
Nvidia calls this new platform the "Universal Base Model for Humanoid Robots." Essentially, the company is building an AI platform for the recent crop of humanoid robot manufacturers, including 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Yushu Technology, and XPENG Robotics. This covers almost all the well-known humanoid robot manufacturers currently, with a few exceptions such as Tesla.
GR00T will also support NVIDIA's new hardware Jetson Thor, a computer designed for humanoid robots that can run simulation workflows, generative AI models, and more. NVIDIA said that the system-on-chip includes a next-generation GPU based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, and its converter engine can provide 800 TOPS of 8-bit floating-point AI performance for running multimodal generative AI models like GR00T. The integrated functional safety processor, high-performance CPU cluster, and 100GB Ethernet bandwidth greatly simplify design and integration.
While general-purpose humanoid robots are still years away, providing easier access for third-party developers will greatly narrow the gap.
In addition to GR00T, NVIDIA also released two other robot projects at this GTC conference: Isaac Manipulator and Isaac Perceptor.
Isaac Manipulator provides the most advanced flexible modular artificial intelligence capabilities for robot arms and includes a series of basic models and GPU acceleration libraries. It can increase path planning speed by 80 times, and zero-shot learning perception can improve efficiency and throughput, enabling developers to automate more new robot tasks. Currently, well-known companies such as Franka Robotics, PickNik Robotics, READY Robotics, Solomon, Universal Robots and Yaskawa have joined the Isaac Manipulator program.
Another project called Isaac Perceptor is aimed at autonomous mobile robots (AMR). Perceptor continues Nvidia's advantage in robot vision processing and is designed for "multi-camera, 3D surround vision capabilities". Companies such as ArcBest, BYD and KION Group have signed on to use Perceptor.