NVIDIA reports on industrial digitalisation progress at COMPUTEX

At his COMPUTEX keynote address, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang made a number of industrial digitalisation announcements:

Source: NVIDIA Youtube channel, COMPUTEX keynote screen capture. "In the future, robotics is a much more pervasive idea," said Huang.

Robotic factories supercharge industrial digitalisation

NVIDIA has announced that major Taiwanese electronics makers are using the company’s technology to transform their factories into more autonomous facilities with a new reference workflow. The workflow combines NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI, NVIDIA Omniverse physically-based rendering and simulation, and NVIDIA Isaac AI robot development and deployment. By using the workflow to build digital twins for real-time simulation of different factory layouts, manufacturers can optimise space, processes and efficiency without costly physical changes.

By using the workflow to build digital twins for real-time simulation of different factory layouts, manufacturers can optimise space, processes and efficiency without costly physical changes.

“AI for manufacturing is here. Every factory is becoming more and more autonomous due to the transformational impact of generative AI and digital twin technologies,” said Deepu Talla, VP of robotics and edge computing at NVIDIA. 

“With NVIDIA Omniverse, Metropolis and Isaac, the industrial ecosystem can accelerate its adoption of autonomous technologies, helping advance operational efficiencies and lower costs.”

Delta Electronics, Foxconn, Pegatron and Wistron are already using the reference workflow to build, simulate and operate their robotics-enhanced facilities. Electronics manufacturer Foxconn, for example, creates digital twins of its factories on NVIDIA Omniverse. This allows Foxconn’s teams to optimise the equipment layout for operational flow while AI cameras monitor worker safety with NVIDIA Metropolis. 

Foxconn can then use the factory digital twins as virtual training environments to simulate, test and validate its autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) built on NVIDIA Isaac Perceptor acceleration libraries, as well as its AI robot manipulation arms, which are powered by NVIDIA Isaac Manipulator AI models.

“AI and robotics are poised to revolutionise manufacturing, enhancing safety on factory floors and driving significant operational efficiencies,” said Young Liu, CEO and chairman of Foxconn. 

“By integrating NVIDIA Omniverse, Metropolis and Isaac into our operations, we can create sophisticated digital twins of our factories to train robots, optimising workflows with unprecedented precision and reducing costs.”

Delta Electronics, an electronics manufacturer and IoT-based smart green solutions provider, is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim, an extensible robotics simulation platform developed on Omniverse and OpenUSD, an open and extensible ecosystem for 3D worlds, to virtually integrate its demo production lines. It then generates physically accurate, photorealistic synthetic data for training computer vision models for its NVIDIA Metropolis-powered automatic optical inspection and defect detection solutions.

Pegatron, a Taiwan-based manufacturer and service provider, is deploying an NVIDIA Metropolis multicamera workflow and launching new services that connect its NVIDIA Omniverse and Metropolis factory digital twin workflow to NVIDIA NeMo and NVIDIA NIM to help factory operators communicate in real time. The rollout will help improve worker safety and productivity in Pegatron’s factory network, which spans over 21 M sq ft and produces over 15 M assemblies per month.

Wistron, a global electronics manufacturer, has built digital twins of its factories to accelerate the production of NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA HGX servers. It is extending its use of Omniverse to develop digital twins of the data centres that are used to test and ensure the quality, performance and energy consumption of newly-assembled NVIDIA HGX systems.

Using NVIDIA Omniverse to simulate its facility and workflows first has led to Wistron being able to bring its factory online in half the typical time — in just 2.5 months instead of five. Worker efficiency has also increased by more than 50% through pre-testing and optimising layouts.

“The combination of NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Metropolis allows us to test new layouts virtually to identify new processes and monitor real-time operations using live IoT data from every machine on the production line,” said Alec Lai, President of global manufacturing at Wistron. 

“Digitalising our factory planning process has reduced end-to-end cycle times by 50%.”

Explore

Digital twin workflows are available as a reference architecture series.

NVIDIA robotics gains traction

NVIDIA also announced that the world’s leaders in robot development are adopting the NVIDIA Isaac robotics platform for the research, development and production of the next generation of AI-enabled autonomous machines and robots. The platform features a suite of NVIDIA-accelerated libraries, AI foundation models and simulation technologies for robot makers.

BYD Electronics, Siemens, Teradyne Robotics and Intrinsic, an Alphabet company, are among more than a dozen robotics industry leaders globally that are integrating NVIDIA Isaac accelerated libraries, physically-based simulation and AI models into their software frameworks and robot models. The new capabilities can make factories, warehouses and distribution centres highly efficient and safer for their human co-workers, and deliver intelligent assistants for repetitive or ultra-precise tasks, NVIDIA explained.

“The era of robotics has arrived. Everything that moves will one day be autonomous,” said Huang. 

“We are working to accelerate generative physical AI by advancing the NVIDIA robotics stack, including Omniverse for simulation applications, Project GR00T humanoid foundation models and the Jetson Thor robotics computer.”

Isaac’s early adopters are leaders in robotics and autonomous machine development across Asia, Europe and North America, NVIDIA has disclosed.

Siemens, the global industrial automation software and systems provider, is using NVIDIA Isaac Sim for its software-in-the-loop capabilities. Isaac Sim is a reference application for simulating, testing and validating robots in physically based environments, and for generating synthetic data, based on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

The Isaac technologies accelerate Siemens development and testing of advanced robotics skills such as SIMATIC Robot PickAI (PRO) and SIMATIC Robot Pack AI. The AI vision software provides cognitive AI-driven capabilities and enables industrial robot systems to autonomously and reliably pick-and-pack arbitrary items without any prior training of the AI by the user. The companies plan to expand their partnership and announce new capabilities later this year at the SPS Expo.

“AI-powered robots will accelerate the digital transformation of industry and take over repetitive tasks that were previously impossible to automate so we can unlock human potential for more creative and valuable work,” said Roland Busch, President and CEO at Siemens. 

“Together with NVIDIA, Siemens is empowering our customers and partners to use AI to create new innovations, incorporate them as part of their industrial automation solutions and drive efficiency and competitive advantage.”

Intrinsic, a software and AI robotics subsidiary of Alphabet that acquired the Open Source Robotics Corporation in late 2022, has successfully tested Isaac Manipulator in its robot-agnostic software platform. Isaac Manipulator is a reference workflow built on Isaac ROS that simplifies development of AI-enabled robot arms, or manipulators, that can seamlessly perceive, understand and interact with their environments. Isaac ROS, on the other hand, is a collection of modular ROS 2 packages that brings NVIDIA-acceleration and AI models to ROS community developers.

Intrinsic has demonstrated, using Manipulator, the potential for a scalable, universally applicable robotic-grasping skill to work across grippers, environments and objects.

“We couldn’t have found a better collaborator in NVIDIA, who are helping to pave the way for foundation models to have a profound impact on industrial robotics,” said Wendy Tan White, CEO of Intrinsic. 

“As our teams work together on integrating NVIDIA Isaac and Intrinsic’s platform, the potential value we can unlock for millions of developers and businesses is immense.”

BYD Group has a strong manufacturing footprint across four major industries, including electronics, automotive, new energy and rail transportation worldwide. Its one subsidiary, BYD Electronics (BYDE), a global provider of high-tech and innovative products, is developing a full range of autonomous mobile robots that provide factories with complete logistics solutions using NVIDIA Isaac Sim and Isaac Perceptor. Isaac Perceptor is a reference workflow built on Isaac ROS that provides multicamera, 3D surround-vision capabilities for AI-based autonomous mobile robots.

“BYDE has a strong focus on helping customers accelerate deployment of logistics applications,” said Chris Yotive, Senior Business Development Director of BYD Electronics. 

“In collaboration with NVIDIA, we have developed advanced autonomous mobile robots powered by NVIDIA Isaac that will improve worker safety, reduce production costs and enhance production intelligence for our customers.”

Universal Robots (UR) and Mobile Industrial Robots (MiR), Teradyne Robotics companies, are using NVIDIA Isaac to integrate AI into automation. UR is integrating Isaac Manipulator into its PolyScope X software platform to unlock new cobot solutions. MiR is leveraging Isaac Sim to generate synthetic data and simulate its MiR1200 Pallet Jack for real-world deployments.

“The key to tackling our customers’ challenges in robotics lies in the industry’s ability to work together, in one collective effort,” said Ujjwal Kumar, Group President of Teradyne Robotics. 

“With NVIDIA Isaac’s advanced AI and simulation capabilities plugged into our large installed base of autonomous mobile robots and cobots, we will push the envelope of innovation to achieve swift solutions for multiple industries.” 

Isaac Perceptor is being used for the development of advanced perception-based autonomous mobile robots by ArcBest, BYD Electronics, Gideon, idealworks and RGo Robotics. Isaac Manipulator has been deployed for building AI-based robotic arms by Solomon, Techman Robot, Vention and Yaskawa.

Over 100 companies are adopting Isaac Sim to simulate, test and validate robotic applications, NVIDIA added, including Hexagon, Husqvarna Group and MathWorks. Isaac Lab implementations can be found at Agility, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence and Sanctuary AI. Isaac Lab is a reference application in Isaac Sim optimised for reinforcement, imitation and transfer learning for AI robot foundation model training.

Real-Time healthcare, industrial and scientific AI apps at the edge

To address the increasing need for real-time AI computing at the industrial edge, NVIDIA has announced the general software availability of NVIDIA AI Enterprise-IGX with NVIDIA Holoscan on the NVIDIA IGX platform. The NVIDIA IGX platform is designed to improve functional safety and high-bandwidth sensor processing, transforming factory automation and robotic collaboration with AI.

NVIDIA AI Enterprise-IGX is a new offering providing enterprises with unprecedented performance, security and support for the edge computing software stack, streamlining AI-powered operations and the deployment of AI applications at scale. NVIDIA Holoscan is a sensor-processing platform for streamlining the development and deployment of AI and high-performance computing applications to deliver real-time insights. Together, they empower solution providers within the medical, industrial and scientific computing sectors to develop and deploy edge AI solutions faster, with enterprise-grade software and support.

By combining NVIDIA AI Enterprise-IGX and Holoscan on IGX, NVIDIA offers an enterprise-grade platform that delivers powerful AI compute, flexible sensor integration, real-time performance and functional safety for the industrial edge — cutting the time and costs required to build advanced AI solutions across industries.

“As software-defined functionality continues to transform businesses across industries, enterprises are seeking powerful edge AI solutions that can meet their unique performance and regulatory requirements,” said Deepu Talla, VP of robotics and edge computing at NVIDIA. 

“The NVIDIA IGX platform’s new capabilities deliver powerful enterprise-grade software from the cloud to the industrial edge, giving customers increased performance, safety and scalability.”

The NVIDIA IGX platform has undergone a major refresh. In addition to the new NVIDIA AI Enterprise-IGX with NVIDIA Holoscan, the NVIDIA IGX Orin 700, previously called the IGX Boardkit, now supports the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU as a new configuration option, delivering up to 1,705 trillion operations per second — a 7x increase in AI performance compared with using an onboard iGPU.

NVIDIA IGX also supports the new IGX Orin 500 system-on-module, which enables the creation of flexible carrier-board designs and custom configurations without sacrificing enterprise software support.

The NVIDIA-Certified Systems programme has expanded to include the IGX platform, ensuring systems built with IGX are validated to run accelerated AI workloads with optimised performance. Companies including Advantech, ADLINK, Aetina, Ahead, Cosmo Intelligent Medical Devices (a division of Cosmo Pharmaceuticals), Dedicated Computing, Leadtek, Onyx and YUAN are building NVIDIA-certified IGX systems.

Medical technology companies Barco, Karl Storz, Medtronic and others are adopting NVIDIA IGX with Holoscan to accelerate the development of AI-powered solutions for medical diagnostics, surgical copilots, surgical robots, patient care agents and more. Additionally, Johnson & Johnson MedTech is working on how NVIDIA IGX with Holoscan could accelerate the development of AI for Polyphonic, Johnson & Johnson MedTech’s digital ecosystem for surgery.  

Medtronic is leveraging NVIDIA IGX with NVIDIA Holoscan for its GI Genius intelligent endoscopy module designed, developed and manufactured by Cosmo Intelligent Medical Devices. The AI-assisted colonoscopy tool helps physicians detect polyps that can lead to colorectal cancer.

“The NVIDIA IGX with Holoscan platform has significantly accelerated our AI innovation in endoscopy,” said Raj Thomas, President of endoscopy at Medtronic. 

“By leveraging NVIDIA's advanced technology, we can focus on developing groundbreaking software applications that ultimately enhance patient outcomes and provide greater support to physicians. This collaboration underscores our commitment to pioneering advancements in medical technology for the benefit of all.” 

ADLINK is using NVIDIA IGX to build industrial-grade edge AI solutions for its manufacturing processes.

“ADLINK leverages NVIDIA IGX and Holoscan to deliver proactive safety capabilities that ensure more efficient, seamless human and robot collaboration,” said Stephen Huang, President and COO at ADLINK. 

“Working with NVIDIA, we continue to drive precision, safety and latency improvements to optimise manufacturing operations like machine movement routing, robotic arm operation and charging-station monitoring all at once.”