Amid the festivities at its fall 2022 GTC conference, Nvidia took the wraps off new robotics-related hardware and services aimed at companies developing and testing machines across industries like manufacturing. Isaac Sim, Nvidia’s robotics simulation platform, will soon be available in the cloud, the company said. And Nvidia’s lineup of system-on-modules is expanding with Jetson Orin Nano, a system designed for low-powered robots — plus a new platform called IGX.
Isaac Sim, which launched in open beta last June, allows designers to simulate robots interacting with mockups of the real world (think digital re-creations of warehouses and factory floors). Users can generate datasets from simulated sensors to train the models on real-world robots, leveraging synthetic data from batches of parallel, unique simulations to improve the model’s performance.
It’s not just marketing bluster, necessarily. Some research suggests that synthetic data has the potential to address many of the development challenges plaguing companies attempting to operationalize AI. MIT researchers recently found a way to classify images using synthetic data, and nearly every major autonomous vehicle company uses simulation data to supplement the real-world data they collect from cars on the road.