Meet Six Smart Robots at GTC 2020

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

The GPU Technology Conference is like a new Star Wars movie. There are always cool new robots scurrying about.

This year’s event in San Jose, March 22?26, is no exception, with at least six autonomous machines expected on the show floor. Like C3PO and BB8, each one is different.

Among what you’ll see at GTC 2020:

• a robotic dog that sniffs out trouble in complex environments such as construction sites
• a personal porter that lugs your stuff while it follows your footsteps
• a man-sized bot that takes inventory quickly and accurately
• a short, squat bot that hauls as much as 2,200 pounds across a warehouse
• a delivery robot that navigates sidewalks to bring you dinner

“What I find interesting this year is just how much intelligence is being incorporated into autonomous machines to quickly ingest and act on data while navigating around unstructured environments that sometimes are not safe for humans,” said Amit Goel, senior product manager for autonomous machines at NVIDIA and robot wrangler for GTC 2020.

The ANYmal C from ANYbotics AG (pictured above), based in Zurich, is among the svelte navigators, detecting obstacles and finding its own shortest path forward thanks to its Jetson AGX Xavier GPU. The four-legged bot can slip through passages just 23.6 inches wide and climb stairs as steep as 45 degrees on a factory floor to inspect industrial equipment with its depth, wide-angle and thermal cameras.

The folks behind the Vespa scooter will show Gita, a personal robot that can carry up to 40 pounds of your gear for four hours on a charge. It runs computer vision algorithms on a Jetson TX2 GPU to identify and follow its owner’s legs on any hard surfaces.

Say cheese. Bossa Nova Robotics will show its retail robot that can scan a 40-foot supermarket aisle in 60 seconds, capturing 4,000 images that it turns into inventory reports with help from its NVIDIA Turing architecture RTX GPU. Walmart plans to use the bots in at least 650 of its stores.

Mobile Industrial Robots A/S, based in Odense, Denmark, will give a talk at GTC about how it’s adding AI with Jetson Xavier to its pallet-toting robots to expand their work repertoire. On the show floor, it will demonstrate one of the robots from its MiR family that can carry payloads up to 2,200 pounds while using two 3D cameras and other sensors to navigate safely around people and objects in a warehouse.

From the other side of the globe, ExaWizards Inc. (Tokyo) will show its multimodal AI technology running on robotic arms from Japan’s Denso Robotics. It combines multiple sensors to learn human behaviors and perform jobs such as weighing a set portion of water.

Rounding out the cast, the Serve delivery robot from Postmates will make a return engagement at GTC. It can carry 50 pounds of goods for 30 miles, using a Jetson AGX Xavier and Ouster lidar to navigate sidewalks like a polite pedestrian. In a talk, a Postmates engineer will share lessons learned in its early deployments.

Many of the latest systems reflect the trend toward collaborative robotics that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang demonstrated in a keynote in December. He showed ways humans can work with and teach robots directly, thanks to an updated NVIDIA Isaac developers kit that also speeds development by using AI and simulations to train robots, now part of NVIDIA’s end-to-end offering in robotics.

Just for fun, GTC also will host races of AI-powered DIY robotic cars, zipping around a track on the show floor at speeds approaching 50 mph. You can sign up here if you want to bring your own Jetson-powered robocar to the event.

We’re saving at least one surprise in robotics for those who attend. To get in on the action, register here for GTC 2020.