NVIDIA has announced that it’s building a new AI platform for just about all of the big players in humanoid robot development, which is based on a general-purpose foundation model that’s possibly named after a talking tree-like creature from the Marvel Universe.
The Generalist Robot 00 Technology project – or GR00T for short – is described as “a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, designed to further its [NVIDIA’s] work driving breakthroughs in robotics and embodied AI.”
As you might expect for a first introduction, low-level details are somewhat lacking. It’s being designed so that bots will be able to understand natural language, for the next stage of the kind of interaction with humans that was recently demonstrated to great effect by Figure’s GPT-enhanced 01 humanoid.
The technology will also allow them to learn new skills by watching humans (via videos or VR), to give them the tools they need to “navigate, adapt and interact” – and work – in the real world. Reinforcement learning at scale is facilitated through an application built on the company’s Isaac Sim robotics simulation platform, while training and inference workflows can be coordinated and delivered through a cloud-based service. New tools have also been added to the Isaac suite to support industrial bot development.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA had some new hardware to announce as well. The Jetson Thor system-on-chip includes a “high-performance CPU” and a next-gen Graphics Processing Unit that can run models like GR00T thanks to a “transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating point AI performance.”
Towards the end of his keynote at the GTC developer gathering in San Jose, California, NVIDIA’s always entertaining Jensen Huang was joined onstage by a line of nine humanoid robots currently in development – along with a couple of Disney bots built around the company’s Jetson computers and trained in the Isaac Sim robotics simulator.
The purpose of this gathering was to show that the company is working on a new AI platform for leading lights of humanoid robot development, including Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Agility Robotics, Unitree Robotics, Apptronik, 1X Technologies, Sanctuary AI, Fourier Intelligence and XPeng Robotics.
The pace of development in the humanoid robotics space is already proving to be incredibly fast, and with GR00T and its other platforms and hardware, NVIDIA is looking to be at the center of the action. You can tune into Huang’s full keynote on the company’s YouTube channel, or watch the featured robotics promo below.
NVIDIA Robotics: A Journey From AVs to Humanoids
Source: NVIDIA
This post originally appeared on TechToday.