Nvidia will soon be making available autonomous mobile robots for warehousing and other applications, according to CEO Jensen Huang during his keynote address at last week’s Computex in Taipei.

The Nvidia Isaac autonomous mobile robot (AMR) platform is an end-to-end autonomy stack that enables a fleet of coordinated robots to function robustly and safely among humans in large, highly dynamic, unstructured environments. Isaac AMR enables autonomy for mobile robots, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and forklifts.

In his first live keynote since the pandemic, Huang kicked off the Computex conference in Taipei, announcing platforms that companies can use to ride a historic wave of generative AI that’s transforming industries from advertising to manufacturing to telecoms.

“We’re back,” Huang said after years of virtual keynotes, some from his home kitchen. “I haven’t given a public speech in almost four years. Wish me luck!”

As mobile robot shipments surge to meet the growing demands of industries seeking operational efficiencies, Nvidia is launching a platform to enable the next generation of AMR fleets.

Isaac AMR brings mapping, autonomy and simulation to mobile robots and will soon be available for early users, Huang announced. It is a platform to simulate, validate, deploy, optimise and manage fleets of AMRs. It includes edge-to-cloud software services, computing and a set of reference sensors and robot hardware to accelerate development and deployment of AMRs, reducing costs and time to market.

Mobile robot shipments are expected to climb from 251,000 units in 2023 to 1.6 million by 2028, with revenue forecast to jump from $12.6bn to $64.5bn in the period, according to ABI Research.

Despite the explosive adoption of robots, the intralogistics industry faces challenges.

Traditionally, software applications for autonomous navigation are often coded from scratch for each robot, making rolling out autonomy across different robots complex. Also, warehouses, factories and fulfilment centres are enormous, making them hard to map for robots and keep updated. And integrating AMRs into existing workflows, fleet management and warehouse management systems can be complicated.

For those working in robotics and seeking to migrate traditional forklifts or automated guided vehicles to fully autonomous mobile robots, Isaac AMR provides the blueprint to accelerate the migration to full autonomy, reducing costs and speeding deployment.

Isaac AMR is built on the foundations of the Nvidia Nova Orin reference architecture, which integrates multiple sensors including stereo cameras, fisheye cameras, and 2D and 3D lidars with the Nvidia Jetson AGX Orin system-on-module. The reference robot hardware comes with Nova Orin pre-integrated, making it easier for developers to evaluate Isaac AMR in their own environments.

The compute engine of Nova is Orin, which delivers access to AI and hardware-accelerated algorithms that can be run using 275Tops of edge computing in real time.

The synchronised and calibrated sensor suite offers sensor diversity and redundancy for real-time 3D perception and mapping. Cloud-native tools for record, upload and replay enable debugging, map creation, training and analytics.

Isaac AMR offers a foundation for mapping, autonomy and simulation. It accelerates mapping and semantic understanding of large environments by tying into DeepMap’s cloud-based service to help accelerate robot mapping of large facilities from weeks to days, offering centimetre-level accuracy without the need for a highly skilled team of technicians. It can generate rich 3D voxel maps, which can be used to create occupancy maps and semantic maps for multiple types of AMRs.

Additionally, Isaac AMR shortens the time to develop and deploy robots in large, highly dynamic and unstructured environments with autonomy that’s enabled by multimodal navigation with cloud-based fleet optimisation using Nvidia CuOpt software.

An accelerated and modular framework enables real-time camera and lidar perception. Planning and control using path planners, behaviour planners and use of semantic information make the robot operate autonomously in complex environments. A low-code, no-code interface makes it easy to develop and customise applications for different scenarios and use cases.

Finally, Isaac AMR simplifies robot operations by tapping into physics-based simulation from Isaac Sim, powered by Nvidia Omniverse, an open development platform for industrial digitalisation. This can bring digital twins to life, so the robot application can be developed, tested and customised for each customer before deploying in the physical world. This significantly reduces the operational cost and complexity of deploying AMRs.