Robotics developer toolbox — Isaac apps, GEMs, Robot Engine and Sim — is moving into general availability
March 18, 2019 – Robotics developers are off to the races creating autonomous machines of the future.
We’re fueling their efforts with the NVIDIA Isaac SDK, which will be publicly available soon as a free robotics developer toolbox for accelerating innovation and deployment.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang announced the news today on stage to a packed crowd at our GPU Technology Conference.
Building robots has historically been difficult. Delivering robot intelligence has been deterred by a lack of unified and easy-to-use software and hardware platforms. Robotics development at scale has, until recently, required custom programming to simulate robots in operation.
The Isaac SDK robotics developer toolbox changes that — and moves to general availability in April.
This toolbox offers developers access to Isaac applications, Gems (robot capabilities), a Robot Engine and Sim. It will save manufacturers, researchers and startups hundreds of hours by making it easier to add AI for perception, navigation and manipulation into next-generation robots.
At the core is Isaac Robot Engine, which enables developers to build modular and high-speed robotics applications easily deployed to Jetson platforms, including our robot reference designs.
There’s also more than 20 GEMs, providing plug-and-go functions for hard robotics problems such as navigation and perception algorithms. GEMs are essential and fundamental robotics algorithm modules that are built and optimized for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX platform.
What the industry has previously lacked was a complete platform built on an ecosystem of trusted industry-standard software and hardware.
To help achieve that, we’re making open sourcing our robot hardware reference designs today:
Welcome Back, Carter
Developers can use the Isaac SDK robot developer toolbox to create applications with our Carter autonomous delivery and logistics robot, based on Jetson AGX Xavier.
Businesses of all sizes can use this to build applications that enable robots to navigate and move things about.
Kaya bunga, Nano!
Researchers and casual makers alike can use the developer toolbox to create applications with Kaya, a robot based on our low-cost Jetson Nano, to create autonomous machines.
Jetson Nano
Jetson Nano comes in two versions: The $99 developer kit is ideal for makers, developers, learners and students; The $129 production-ready module is for mass market AI products needing horsepower at the edge.
Low cost doesn’t have to mean low flops. Look under the hood: 472 GFLOPs of compute performance to run AI workloads.
The Jetson Nano Developer Kit is available now. The Jetson Nano module will be available June 2019.
Isaac GEMs
GEMs are essential and fundamental robotics algorithm modules that are built and optimized for the NVIDIA Jetson AGX platform. For e.g. GEMs enable developers to easily add SLAM navigation features — obstacle avoidance, lidar-based localization, path planning and map creation — and interactions with humans such as voice command detection.
Isaac Robot Engine
Isaac Robot Engine offers a framework that allows developers to easily write modular applications for deployment on robots. Isaac Robot Engine is optimized for performance across the entire NVIDIA Jetson family — Jetson AGX Xavier, Jetson TX2 and Jetson Nano along with GPU-powered workstations.
Isaac Robot Engine delivers to users advanced monitoring and debugging capabilities required to build complex and highly parallel compute graphs. Capabilities include logging and replay of sensor data, efficient memory management and live web-based visualization.
Isaac Sim
Isaac Sim allows developers to test robots — without breaking things — in simulation. Once tested, applications can be deployed on robots running on Jetson.
It’s easy to do this with the Isaac SDK, allowing for high-fidelity simulation and advanced real-time rendering. Isaac Sim is tightly coupled to the tools and framework in this toolbox, making for easy transfer of data and algorithms with robots — key for accelerating robot development under deadline pressures.
Isaac Sim is a virtual robotics laboratory, a rich 3D world simulator that enables research and design for robots of the future at lower cost and time than would be possible without simulation.
Soon robots will be everywhere, and many people will work and live alongside them. Safety demands new and better ways to design and test robotics systems.
With Isaac Sim, engineering and testing that could take months can happen in minutes.
Start Revving Your Robotic Engines
In April, the Isaac SDK will generally available for download. Additional details on reference designs will be shared soon.
