Nvidia working on universal robot ‘brain’


Nvidia has announced a suite of services, models, and computing to accelerate the global development of humanoid robots.

The world’s leading AI chip maker said it was releasing the suite to a number of robot manufacturers, AI model creators, and software developers worldwide.

It said it expected the move to help develop, train, and build the “next generation” of humanoid robots.

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“The next wave of AI is robotics, and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia.

“We’re advancing the entire Nvidia robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries, and AI models best suited for their needs,” he said.

The new offerings include Nvidia’s new NIM microservices and frameworks for robot simulation and learning and the OSMO orchestration service for running multi-stage robotics workloads.

Also included is an AI- and simulation-enabled teleoperation – or remote control – workflow that allows developers to train robots using small amounts of human demonstration data.

Fourier, a general-purpose robot platform company, is one of the first to join Nvidia’s early-access program.

“Developing humanoid robots is extremely complex – requiring an incredible amount of real data, tediously captured from the real world,” said Alex Gu, chief executive at Fourier.

“Nvidia’s new simulation and generative AI developer tools will help bootstrap and accelerate our model development workflows,” Gu said.

Other early joiners include 1X, Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, Field AI, Figure, Galbot, LimX Dynamics, Neura Robotics, RobotEra, and Skild AI, among others.

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“I believe we are one step closer to solving the AI brain for humanoid robots,” Jim Fan, from Nvidia Research, said.