Apptronik, a leader in next-generation general-purpose humanoid robots designed to change the way we live and work, announced its collaboration with NVIDIA to enhance humanoid robot learning. Apptronik’s Apollo humanoid robot will integrate with NVIDIA’s new general-purpose foundation model for robot learning, Project GR00T, to make possible a humanoid robot-augmented future that will better serve humanity.
The world is designed for humans – so it makes sense that humanoid robots are the type of robot best equipped to navigate, adapt, and interact with it. Furthermore, humanoid robots comprise the ideal hardware for learning general-purpose skills by observing human demonstrations. The combination of Apollo and Project GR00T will enable developers to take text, video, and human demonstrations as task prompts, learn generalizable skills like coordination and dexterity, and generate actions as output on the robot hardware. Instead of simply repeating the actions in the training data, Apollo will recognize the environment and predict what to do next to achieve its goal.
Today’s NVIDIA GTC keynote included an example of this type of learning, demonstrating how Apollo, through its integration with the GR00T foundation models, learned how to autonomously operate a juicer and serve juice to a person.
Apollo’s main computing system, including onboard NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Orin NX modules, enables the AI-powered robot to efficiently leverage cutting-edge models such as GR00T to perform a wide variety of tasks, while its humanoid form allows it to learn from human demonstrations. This results in faster skill development, advancing the field of general-purpose robots as Apptronik continues to develop its next-generation robotics computing platform. Apptronik will leverage NVIDIA’s portfolio of AI offerings for humanoid robots, including the new GR00T foundation models, Isaac Lab, and the OSMO compute orchestration service, announced at GTC.
“Generative AI is currently used to generate text, images, and video. The next frontier is to leverage these AI tools to generate intelligent humanoid robot behavior,” said Jeff Cardenas, co-founder and CEO of Apptronik. “In addition to our internal efforts, our collaboration with NVIDIA will combine the superior hardware design of our Apollo humanoid robot with NVIDIA-powered multimodal learning from demonstration – particularly video demonstration. We believe this combination has the potential to change the world and benefit all of humanity.”
SOURCE: PRNewswire
