Project GROOT, Nvidia's AI Model For Humanoid Robot Development (Image: Nvidia)Nvidia is all set to make a significant initiative in robotics technology with Project GROOT. It is a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. Project GROOT was unveiled at the company’s annual developer conference.
As part of the initiative, the renowned chipmaker also announced a new computer, Jetson Thor, for humanoid robots based on the NVIDIA Thor system-on-a-chip (SoC). The company claims that they have also made upgrades to the Nvidia Isaac robotics platform. According to Nvidia, GROOT powered robots will be designed to understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions.
Notably, GR00T stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology. Meanwhile, the chipmaker developed Jetson Thor as a new computing platform that has the capacity to perform complex tasks and interact safely and naturally with people and machines. Nvidia claims that it has a modular architecture optimised for performance, power, and size.
“Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while unveiling the GROOT. “The enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists around the world to take giant leaps towards artificial general robotics,” Jensen Huang added.
The company also mentioned in its statement that they are building a comprehensive AI platform for leading humanoid robot companies, including Agility Robotics, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics, and XPENG Robotics. Jonathan Hurst, the chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, said that modern AI will pave the way for robots like Digit to help people in all aspects of daily life.
During the event, Nvidia also unveiled a new generation of artificial intelligence chips. Nvidia claims that the latest Blackwell platform enables organisations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor. The company also added that tech giants including Google, Meta, Amazon Web Services, and Dell Technologies are expected to adopt the Blackwell platform.