Could humanoid robots get a lot more human? Nvidia may have made that possibility a bit realer today with a smarter robot brain that has less energy demands.
The tech giant’s latest robotics offering is Jetson Thor, a super computer built for real-time AI computation on humanoid robots and smart machines alike, Nvidia announced in a press release on Monday.
The new module is built to handle larger amounts of information at less energy than previous model Jetson Orin. Powered by the latest Blackwell GPUs, Jetson Thor has more than seven times the AI compute power and twice the memory at more than three times speed and efficiency than its predecessor, Nvidia claims.
All this new power is supposed to unlock higher speed sensor data and visual reasoning that can help humanoid robots get better at autonomously seeing, moving, and making decisions.
“Jetson Thor solves one of the most significant challenges in robotics: enabling robots to have real-time, intelligent interactions with people and the physical world,” the company wrote.
It’s a considerable performance leap that Nvidia hopes will appeal to engineers. The company says early adopters include Amazon, Meta, Caterpillar, and Agility Robotics, a startup that makes commercially available humanoid robots for warehouses and other manufacturing facilities. The model is being considered for adoption by John Deere and OpenAI.
It’s also being adopted by research labs at Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Zurich, to power autonomous robots in medical research settings and more, Nvidia said in a blog post on Monday.
The developer kit Jetson AGX Thor, which includes the Jetson T5000 module plus a reference carrier board, power supply, and an active heatsink with a fan, is now on sale on the company’s website starting at $3,499.
Coming soon—and available now on pre-order—is Nvidia Drive AGX Thor, a developer kit using the same technology but for autonomous vehicles instead. Deliveries for that are slated to start in September, the company said.
Nvidia’s growing bet on robotics
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