The Robot Report editorial director Gene Demaitre not too long ago returned from the worldwide R-24 occasion in Odense Denmark March 13-15, 2024. From this journey, he instantly headed out to San Jose CA to attend the NVIDIA GTC24 occasion with senior editor, Mike Oitzman.
In this episode, Gene and Mike discuss what Gene realized and what he noticed throughout his go to to Odense. From there, the cohosts focus on their expertise on the GTC24 occasion, and all the attention-grabbing periods on AI and robotics, the NVIDIA product bulletins for robotics along with the product demos from distributors who exhibited on the present ground.
R-24: Robots, Automation, and Drones
- Odense Robotics is among the largest robotics clusters on the planet, with 350 members throughout Denmark, about half of that are within the Odense space.
- It employs about 18,000 folks, with plans to double that over the subsequent decade
- Among the attention-grabbing issues the worldwide delegations noticed was Odense Port, which is now constructing large wind generators along with sustaining container ships.
- The delegation visited the drone middle on the Hans Christian Andersen Airport, which has an enormous airspace hall for testing; the Danish Technological Institute, which hosts the Odense Robotics Startup Fund; and the Maersk-McKinney Moller Institute on the University of Southern Denmark.
- Odense can be internet hosting ROSCon this yr.
- Event web site: https://roboticsevent.eu/en/
NVIDIA GTC24
News introduced on the GTC24 occasion:
New basis for humanoid robotics
The massive information from the robotics facet of the home is that NVIDIA launched a brand new general-purpose basis mannequin for humanoid robots known as Project GR00T. This new mannequin is designed to convey robotics and embodied AI collectively whereas enabling the robots to grasp pure language and emulate actions by observing human actions.
GR00T makes use of the brand new Jetson Thor
As a part of its robotics bulletins, NVIDIA unveiled Jetson Thor for humanoid robots, based mostly on the NVIDIA Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC). Significant upgrades to the NVIDIA Isaac robotics platform embrace generative AI basis fashions and instruments for simulation and AI workflow infrastructure.
The Thor SoC features a next-generation GPU based mostly on NVIDIA Blackwell structure with a transformer engine delivering 800 teraflops of 8-bit floating-point AI efficiency. With an built-in practical security processor, a high-performance CPU cluster, and 100GB of Ethernet bandwidth, it could possibly simplify design and integration efforts, claimed the firm.
NVIDIA updates Isaac simulation platform
The Isaac instruments that GR00T makes use of are able to creating new basis fashions for any robotic embodiment in any setting, in keeping with NVIDIA. Among these instruments are Isaac Lab for reinforcement studying, and OSMO, a compute orchestration service.
NVIDIA DRIVE Thor for robotic axis
The firm additionally introduced NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, which now supersedes NVIDIA DRIVE Orin as a SoC for autonomous driving purposes.
Other notable periods (value watching the replays):
- Geordie ROSE – CEO of Sanctuary: “Using Omniverse to generate first-person experiential data for humanoid robots”
- Aaron Saunders – CTO of Boston Dynamics: “Deploying AI in real-world robots”
- Vincent Vanhouke – Google Deepmind: “Robotics in the Age of GenAI”
Interesting robots seen at GTC24:
- Agility DIGIT (static)
- Apptronik Apollo (Static)
- Unitree H1
- 1X Eve
- Fourier Analysis – GR1
- Disney BD-X droids
- ANYbotics ANYmal
- Enchanted Tools Mirokai
- Richtech Robotics ADAM