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Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth

188 points by pella 2y ago

pella 2y ago
https://archive.md/jqMKX https://archive.md/jqMKX
veunes 2y ago
Robotics has long been an area of promise but (I think) limited returns
- spot5010 2y ago
  Care to elaborate? I feel the. the real power of AI will be unlocked when AI can sense and interact with the world.
- malux85 2y ago
  Yeah but the limiting factor for ages has been software and batteries, both of which have been improving a lot in the last 5-8 years.
- Animats 2y ago
  Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015. Robots are a branch of industrial manufacturing machinery. That is not, historically, a high-margin business. It also demands high reliability and long machine life. Interestingly, there's a trend towards renting robots by the working hour. It's a service - the robot company comes in, sets up robot workers, services them as needed, and monitors them remotely. The robot company gets paid for each operating hour. Pricing is somewhat below what humans cost.[1] [1] https://bernardmarr.com/robots-as-a-service-a-technology-trend-every-business-must-consider/ https://bernardmarr.com/robots-as-a-service-a-technology-tre...
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Having been involved in similar financial arrangements in software automation, years ago, it makes sense. The end user usually doesn't have the expertise to even maintain the systems, nor does it make sense for them to do it in-house. Charging per item of work (operating hour or thing processed) allows use of consultants but keeps incentives aligned between all parties (maximize uptime/productivity).
  - ksec 2y ago
    That is interesting. I assume robots here means something close to humanoid for rent, and be programmed to take some or most of the human's job and not robots in terms of industrial manufacturing machinery?
    - Animats 2y ago
      Robot, as used here, is, in more modern forms, one or more arms with a vision system. Or some kind of mobile base for moving things around.
    - e_y_ 2y ago
      They're industrial robot arms, not humanoids, although the concept of android workers getting paid an hourly fee or "wage" (going to their masters, an android rental corporation) would be fascinating.
      - bregma 2y ago
        Even just a robot arm with an appropriate sensors and hand attachment could replace human employees in the world's oldest profession. Consider what drove the video industry if you're looking to invest.
  - rapsey 2y ago
    > Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015. Lots of dotcom busts in the late 90s were concepts that worked 10-15 years later. We just did not have broadband and smartphones. Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past.
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      > Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past. Cheap semiconductors as well. Fabricating a chip on a 28nm and 48nm process is extremely commodified nowadays. These are the same processes used to fabricate an Nvidia Tesla or an i7 or Xeon barely a decade ago, so the raw compute power available at extremely commodified prices is insane. Just about every regional power has the ability to fabricate an Intel i7 or Nvidia Tesla equivalent nowadays. And most regional powers have 3-7 year plans to build domestic 14nm fabrication capacity as well now. A number of firms like Taiwan's PSMC have made a killing selling the end-to-end IP and workflow for fabrication.
  - petra 2y ago
    Given that robot-as-a-service removes the biggest barriers for companies not buying robots, why aren't we seeing a huge growth in "employed" robots?
    - Animats 2y ago
      Because the setup is still too complicated. This will probably take off once Amazon finally gets robots that can do unboxing, picking, and boxing. They've been trying for years to get that to work. Amazon already has robots doing most of the lifting and carrying, but people still handle each item. People have been trying to do bin picking fulfillment with robots since the 1980s. Swisslog, Brightpick, and Universal Robotics have all demoed this, but so far it's not working well enough to take over. It's getting close, though.
- contingencies 2y ago
  Robotics is everywhere but you don't see it. The joke is we call it something else when it works. Large corporations with successful margin-supporting automation systems have every intent and reason to keep them secret. See for example ASML.
- JFingleton 2y ago
  Here in the UK there's been a boom in robot delivery over the years: https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/ "Slow but steady" I would call it.
peppertree 2y ago
After using FSD 13 for 2 weeks I'm convinced we are close to solving self driving. Too bad the everyone lost interest and now robotics is the hot new thing.
- mdorazio 2y ago
  Waymo already solved self driving years ago. Tesla still has a long way to go.
  - echelon 2y ago
    Is there anyone even close to Waymo in this game? Is Waymo going to own the entire market?
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Why would waymo own the entire market? Sure, they might be the first ones there, but every year recreating what is "good enough" should be cheaper and cheaper.
    - krupan 2y ago
      Cruise is close to Wayno, but nobody is willing to invest in Cruise anymore
      - AlotOfReading 2y ago
        Cruise doesn't exist anymore (or rather shortly won't). The teams are being folded into GM to work on other things.
    - 05 2y ago
      Baidu Apollo. They also have a commercial fleet without in-car safety drivers (they use remote operators for real time monitoring, though, so hard to say how hands-off it really is)
    - rapsey 2y ago
      Waymo works in US grid cities on highly modified cars. I know people love hating Musk, but it is still very much up in the air if Waymo will be a better solution than what Tesla or Wayve is doing.
ram_rattle 2y ago
I personally think apart from GPU and compute for intelligence for meaningful robotics to take off we still have lot of things to crack like better battery, better affordable sensors, microelectronics etc, I'm pretty sure we will get there but I don't think one company can do it.
- 01100011 2y ago
  Better battery isn't really an issue for factories. Same with sensors if you're saving the cost of employing a human, especially for dangerous work.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    True - and of course factories don't mind if a robot costs $40,000 if the payback time is right. But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap. nvidia has several irons in the fire here. Industrial robot? Self-driving car? Creepy humanoid robots? Experimental academic robots? Whatever your needs are, nvidia is ready with a GPU, some software, and some tutorials on the basics.
    - Onavo 2y ago
      > But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap. That's because the past year of robotics advancements (e.g. https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0, https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13196 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13196) has been driven by advances in machine learning and multimodal foundation models. There has been very little change in the actual electronics and mechanical engineering of robotics. So it's no surprise that the traditional hardware leaders like Kuka and ABB are not seeing massive gains so far. I suspect they might get the Tesla treatment soon when the Chinese competitors like unitree start muscling into the humanoid robotics space. Robotics advancements are now AI driven and software defined. It turned out that adding a camera and tying a big foundation model to a traditional robot is all you need. Wall-E is now experiencing the ImageNet moment.
whatever1 2y ago
What is the new breakthrough in robotics that is gpu driven ? There are subsets of the overall problem that can be solved by a gpu (eg object detection) but the whole planning and control algo scheme seems to be more or less the same as it has been for the past decades. These typically involve non-convex optimization so not much gpu benefit.
- pseudosudoer 2y ago
  There are search spaces that are quite large that are used in optimal control. GPUs can be used to drastically accelerate finding a solution. As an example, imagine you are given a height map, a 2D discrete search space overlayed in the height map, 4 legs, and robot dynamics for every configuration of the legs in their constrained workspace. Find the optimal toe placement of the 4 legs. Although a GPU isn't designed exactly to deal with this sort of problem, if it's framed as a reduction problem it still significantly out performs a multi core CPU.
  - whatever1 2y ago
    These are sparse systems, factorization is not a strength of the gpu architectures. Typically adding more cpu cores is a better investment rather than trying to parallelize it through gpu. Nvidia has been trying for some time to make progress with cuSparse etc, although not much has been achieved in the space. Maybe they try a completely different approach with reinforcemnt learning and a ton of parallel simulations?
    - deleted 2y ago
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- mattlondon 2y ago
  > What is the new breakthrough in robotics that is gpu driven ? There are subsets of the overall problem that can be solved by a gpu (eg object detection) but the whole planning and control algo scheme seems to be more or less the same as it has been for the past decades I think the "object detection" goes quite far beyond the classic "objection detection" bounding boxes etc we're used to seeing. So not just a pair of x,y coords for the bounding box for e.g. a mug of coffee in the robot's field of view, but what is the orientation of the mug? where is the handle? If the handle is obscured, can we infer where it might be based on what we understand for what a mug typically looks like and plan our gripper motion towards it (and at 120hz etc)? Is it a solid mug, or a paper cup (affects grip strength/pressure)? Etc etc. Then there is the whole thing about visually show the robot once what you are doing, and it automatically "programs" itself to repeat the tasks in a generalised way etc. Then you could probably spawn 100 startups just on hooking up a LLM to tell a robot what to do in a residential setting (make me a coffee, clear up the kitchen, take out the trash etc) This has all been possible before of course, but could it be done "on device" in a power efficient way? I am guessing they are hoping to sell a billion or two chips + boards to be built directly into things to do so so that your next robotic vacuum or lawn mower or whatever will be able to respond to you yelling at it and not mangle your pets/small children in the process. I eagerly await the day when I have a plug and play robot platform that can tell the difference between my young children and a fox, and attack the fox shitting/shredding something small and fluffy in the garden but ignore the kids
asadalt 2y ago
if they really want to bet on robotics, I want them to release a $10 variant of jetson board.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  A few weeks ago they have reduced the price of the Orin Nano development kit from $500 to $250, while also increasing a few of the performance limits that cripple it in comparison with the more expensive Orin models. Previously it was far too overpriced for most uses (except for someone developing a certified automotive device), but at the new price and performance it has become competitive with the existing alternatives in the same $150 to $300 price range, which are based on Intel, AMD, MediaTek, Qualcomm or Rockchip CPUs.
  - bradfa 2y ago
    When they reduced the price of the dev kit, they priced it below the low volume sales price of the cheapest Orin Nano 4GB module. Presumably the module prices go down when you buy in bulk but for small volumes it was (is still?) cheaper to buy the dev kit and throw away the carrier than to just buy the module. Granted the dev kits went out of stock pretty quick.
- jononor 2y ago
  For 10 USD you get an ESP32S3 board, which can do basic computer vision tasks. For example using OpenMV or emlearn-micropython. For 15-20 USD you can get a board that includes an OV2640 camera. Examples would be XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, LilyGo T Camera S3 or "ESP32-S3-CAM" board from misc manufacturers.
  - asadalt 2y ago
    yes that’s what i am working on these days but there is a need for a generally available neural chip (see google’s coral as one attempt). in my tests, esp32s3 is very very slow for any model with conv2d involved. i just want a tiiiny gpu for $10 so i can run smaller models at higher speed than possible with xtensa/rp2040 having limited simd support etc.
albert_e 2y ago
https://archive.ph/uKeHc https://archive.ph/uKeHc
deleted 2y ago
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cess11 2y ago
Since cops, guards and military officers are itching to get autonomous guns it's probably a reasonable move. The genocide of palestinians has showed that people operated gun drones aren't distance enough, the operators cost a lot in psych treatment and personnel churn.
- Qiu_Zhanxuan 2y ago
  Unironically, I think this is one of the "main benefits" that the disconnected people in places of power seems to covet. They won't have a human operator that will do their dirty jobs and potentially leaks the truth out of guilt.
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    I'm bearish on 'ai war' but this sounds like a huge positive if it comes to fruition because war would become more about two sides trying to kill each each sides leaders, instead of these leaders sending masses of doe eyed young people off to die for them. If politicians had real skin in the game there'd be far less war.
    - cess11 2y ago
      That's already being done. Saddam Hussein was quickly killed, and what followed? Same goes for Ghaddaffi. Israel has killed a lot of leaders and is clearly not satisfied with having done that. What they want is border and population control that involves very few ordinary citizens, in large part in expectation of something like hundreds of millions of climate refugees. After having spent a couple of years killing and maiming poor people with almost nowhere to go you tend to need quite a bit of medical care and usually join the anti-war movement regardless if you got a college degree out of it or not. I find it likely we'll see gun mounted robodog patrols along occidental borders within ten years from now, after having tested it on populations elsewhere.
dankobgd 2y ago
took them 16 years to fix night light bug in the driver but yeah robots are the future
stephc_int13 2y ago
I think that most people are underestimating Nvidia strategy. Their bet is that AI will unlock robotics use and they don't want to be simply compute providers, they want to innovate on the whole chain, software, hardware, services, everything. Their position is quite unique as their R&D is basically financed by their future competitors, they are making bank while going where the puck will be.
- nthingtohide 2y ago
  I think Nvidia should try to create an compute-analogue of wifi routers where computation will be offloaded to smart-home gpu-servers. This strategy will cement their future for eternity.
  - dartos 2y ago
    Why sell to consumers when you can sell to large corporations at 10x the price?
    - talldayo 2y ago
      Because consumers will pay ~3-5x MSRP if the hype is big enough.
      - jszymborski 2y ago
        Corps aren't impervious to hype either.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    Something in that spirit is already making progress: compute attached to cell phone towers, called "edge computing". Because you are pooling computer resources across many more users you have better amortized cost than if you had a workstation on every home that was idle 99% of the time. Of course, latency and bandwidth to the cell tower is worse than wifi, but better than if the compute is done on a remote server. I have no idea of which model will succeed for which use cases, but the idea is sound.
mlepath 2y ago
I have worked with Jetson Orin platform, and honestly Nvidia has something that is really easy to work with there. The Jetsons are basically a full GPU (plus some stuff) at very low power. If I were tasked with building a robot it would likely be the first place I look.
- leetrout 2y ago
  They are OK. If you need advanced vision - yes, because CUDA. But off the shelf mini PCs are much more user friendly for existing software IME. Thankfully ARM being so wide spread and continuing to grow this wont matter as much.
  - blihp 2y ago
    Maybe you've had a different experience with GPU drivers on ARM for Linux than most of the rest of us? (i.e. it's the fact that nVidia actually has Linux support on ARM that is the real appeal)
  - talldayo 2y ago
    > But off the shelf mini PCs are much more user friendly for existing software IME. I'd love you to point me in the direction of an off-the-shelf mini PC that has 64gb of addressable memory and CUDA support.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      Off-the-shelf mini-PCs with 64 GB of addressable memory and reasonably powerful integrated GPUs, i.e. faster than the smaller Ampere GPUs of the cheaper NVIDIA Orin models, are plenty. On the other hand, if you force the CUDA support condition and any automatic translation of CUDA programs is not accepted as good enough, then this mandates the use of a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which can be provided only by a mini-ITX mini-PC. There are mini-ITX boards with laptop Ryzen 7940HX or 7945HX CPUs, at prices between $400 and $550. To such a board you must add 64 GB of DRAM, e.g. @ $175, and a GPU, e.g. a RTX 4060 at slightly more than $300. Without a discrete GPU, a case for a mini-ITX motherboard has a volume of only 2.5 liter. With a discrete GPU like RTX 4060, the volume of the case must increase to 5 liter (for cases with PCIe extenders, which allow a smaller volume than typical mini-ITX cases). So your CUDA condition still allows what can be considered an off-the-shelf mini-PC, but mandating CUDA raises the volume from the 0.5 L of a NUC-like mini-PC to 5 L and the price is also raised 2 or 3 times. This of course unless you choose an Orin for CUDA support, but that will not give you 64 GB of DRAM, because NVIDIA has never provided enough memory in any of their products, unless you accept to pay a huge overprice.
leetrout 2y ago
Now if we could get a robotics platform like ROS that actually cares about modern dev patterns and practices from dev's slapping keyboards through production deployment with decent smoke tests, easy versioned artifacts and no need to understand linux packaging details... Coming from web / app dev this was my very least favorite part of working on the software side of robotics with ROS.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  > Coming from web / app dev this was my very least favorite part of working on the software side of robotics with ROS To be brutally honest, you aren't the primary persona in the robotics space. If you have limited resources (as any organization does), the PM for DevEx will target customers with the best "bang-for-buck" from a developer effort to revenue standpoint. Most purchasers and users in the robotics and hardware space tend to be experienced players in the hardware, aerospace, and MechE world, which has different patterns and priorities from a purely software world. If there is a case to be made that there is a significant untapped market, it makes sense for someone like you to go it on your own and create an alternate offering via your own startup.
scottLobster 2y ago
Sounds like NVIDIA doesn't know what the hell the future is going to look like but hopes it's something to do with robotics, and is taking some the boatloads of money from the past few years to build out product lines for every conceivable robotics need. Good for them I guess. The article references a "ChatGPT moment" for physical robotics, but honestly I think the Chat GPT moment has kind of come and gone, and the world still runs largely as it ever did. Probably not the best analogy, unless they're just talking about buckets of VC money flowing into the space to fund lots of bad ideas, which would be good for NVIDIA financially. As an admitted non-expert in this field, I guess the one thing that really annoys me about articles like this is the lack of a concrete vision. It's like Boston Dynamics and their dancing robots, which while impressive, haven't really amounted to much outside of the lab. The last thing I remember reading was a military prototype to carry stuff for infantry that ended up being turned down because it was too loud. The article even confirms this general perspective, ending with "As of right now, we don’t have very effective tools for verifying the safety and reliability properties of machine learning systems, especially in robotics. This is a major open scientific question in the field,” said Rosen." So whatever robot you're developing is incredibly complex, to be trusted with heavy machinery or around consumers directly, while being neither verifiably safe nor reliable. Sorry, but almost everything in this article sounds like a projection of AI-hype onto physical robotics, with all the veracity of "this is good for Bitcoin". Sounds like NVIDIA is doing right by its shareholders though.
akutlay 2y ago
I just finished reading Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book “Power and Progress” where they talk about how the leaders in the technology space is (unfortunately) able to set the direction of the technology according to their goals, not humanity’s goals. This is an excellent example of such power. NVIDIA wants to expand its business and pushes the industry to use more and more AI, which highly depends on their cards. Now all the VCs put billions of dollars towards this goal, thousands of Phds spend all their time, and companies change direction of business to catch the AI hype. Not necessarily because we decided this is the best for humanity, just because it’s the best for NVIDIA.
EarthIsHome 2y ago
The ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, and other hyped usecases have been the driving force for Nvidia: it injected huge sums of money into their R&D, which also stimulated the economy as developers ran to build build build in order to keep up with the demand for datacenters, which in turn required more infrastructure building to satiate the thirst and power needs of datacenters, etc. Before, ChatGPT, I recall the hype was blockchain, crypto, and NFTs; and maybe before that, it was "big data." As the LLM, generative AI, etc. bubble begins to deflate due to investors and companies finding it hard to make profits from those AI usecases, Nvidia needs to pivot. This article indicates that Nvidia is hedging on robotics as the next driving force that will continue to sustain the massive interest in their products. Personally, I don't see how robotics can maintain that same driving force for their products, and investors will find it hard to squeeze profit out of it, and they'll be back to searching for another hype. It's like Nvidia is trying to create a market to justify their products and continued development, similar to what Meta has tried, to spectacular failure, with the Metaverse for their virtual products. After the frenzy that sustained these compute products transitioned from big data, to crypto, and now, to AI, I'm curious what the next jump will be; I don't think the "physical AI" space of robotics can sustain Nvidia in the way that they're hoping.
- infecto 2y ago
  The part that is hard for me to parse is there is hype but there is also a significant amount of value being extracted by using LLMs and other products coming from this new wave. Everytime I read opinions like yours it’s hard to make sense of it because there is value in the tooling that exists. It cannot be applied to everything and anything but it does exist.
- gmays 2y ago
  Comparing AI to crypto doesn't really work due to the utility of AI. If you believe that there haven't been meaningful use cases from the recent generative AI surge, then you might be out of touch. On the investment side, it's hard to say that since ROIC is still generally up and to the right. As long as that continues, so will investment. Then biggest gap I see is expected if you look at past trends like mobile and the internet: In the first wave of new tech there's a lot of trying to do the old things in the new way, which often fails or gives incremental improvements at best. This is why the 'new' companies seem to be doing the best. I've been shocked at so many new AI startups generating millions in revenue so quickly (billions with OpenAI, but that's a special case). It's because they're not shackled to past products, business models, etc. However, there are plenty of enterprise companies trying to integrate AI into existing workflows and failing miserably. Just like when they tried to retrofit factories with electricity. It's not just plug and play in most cases, you need new workflows, etc. That will take years and there will be plenty more failures. The level of investment is staggering though, and might we see a crash at some point? Maybe, but likely not for a while since there's still so much white space. The hardest thing with new technologies like this is not to confuse the limits of our imagination with the limits of reality (and that goes both ways).
bfrog 2y ago
What breakthrough are people expecting in robotics I wonder?

188 points by pella 2y ago

pella 2y ago

https://archive.md/jqMKX https://archive.md/jqMKX

veunes 2y ago

Robotics has long been an area of promise but (I think) limited returns

spot5010 2y ago
Care to elaborate? I feel the. the real power of AI will be unlocked when AI can sense and interact with the world.
malux85 2y ago
Yeah but the limiting factor for ages has been software and batteries, both of which have been improving a lot in the last 5-8 years.
Animats 2y ago
Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015. Robots are a branch of industrial manufacturing machinery. That is not, historically, a high-margin business. It also demands high reliability and long machine life. Interestingly, there's a trend towards renting robots by the working hour. It's a service - the robot company comes in, sets up robot workers, services them as needed, and monitors them remotely. The robot company gets paid for each operating hour. Pricing is somewhat below what humans cost.[1] [1] https://bernardmarr.com/robots-as-a-service-a-technology-trend-every-business-must-consider/ https://bernardmarr.com/robots-as-a-service-a-technology-tre...
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Having been involved in similar financial arrangements in software automation, years ago, it makes sense. The end user usually doesn't have the expertise to even maintain the systems, nor does it make sense for them to do it in-house. Charging per item of work (operating hour or thing processed) allows use of consultants but keeps incentives aligned between all parties (maximize uptime/productivity).
- ksec 2y ago
  That is interesting. I assume robots here means something close to humanoid for rent, and be programmed to take some or most of the human's job and not robots in terms of industrial manufacturing machinery?
  - Animats 2y ago
    Robot, as used here, is, in more modern forms, one or more arms with a vision system. Or some kind of mobile base for moving things around.
  - e_y_ 2y ago
    They're industrial robot arms, not humanoids, although the concept of android workers getting paid an hourly fee or "wage" (going to their masters, an android rental corporation) would be fascinating.
    - bregma 2y ago
      Even just a robot arm with an appropriate sensors and hand attachment could replace human employees in the world's oldest profession. Consider what drove the video industry if you're looking to invest.
- rapsey 2y ago
  > Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015. Lots of dotcom busts in the late 90s were concepts that worked 10-15 years later. We just did not have broadband and smartphones. Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past.
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    > Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past. Cheap semiconductors as well. Fabricating a chip on a 28nm and 48nm process is extremely commodified nowadays. These are the same processes used to fabricate an Nvidia Tesla or an i7 or Xeon barely a decade ago, so the raw compute power available at extremely commodified prices is insane. Just about every regional power has the ability to fabricate an Intel i7 or Nvidia Tesla equivalent nowadays. And most regional powers have 3-7 year plans to build domestic 14nm fabrication capacity as well now. A number of firms like Taiwan's PSMC have made a killing selling the end-to-end IP and workflow for fabrication.
- petra 2y ago
  Given that robot-as-a-service removes the biggest barriers for companies not buying robots, why aren't we seeing a huge growth in "employed" robots?
  - Animats 2y ago
    Because the setup is still too complicated. This will probably take off once Amazon finally gets robots that can do unboxing, picking, and boxing. They've been trying for years to get that to work. Amazon already has robots doing most of the lifting and carrying, but people still handle each item. People have been trying to do bin picking fulfillment with robots since the 1980s. Swisslog, Brightpick, and Universal Robotics have all demoed this, but so far it's not working well enough to take over. It's getting close, though.
contingencies 2y ago
Robotics is everywhere but you don't see it. The joke is we call it something else when it works. Large corporations with successful margin-supporting automation systems have every intent and reason to keep them secret. See for example ASML.
JFingleton 2y ago
Here in the UK there's been a boom in robot delivery over the years: https://www.starship.xyz/ https://www.starship.xyz/ "Slow but steady" I would call it.

peppertree 2y ago

After using FSD 13 for 2 weeks I'm convinced we are close to solving self driving. Too bad the everyone lost interest and now robotics is the hot new thing.

mdorazio 2y ago
Waymo already solved self driving years ago. Tesla still has a long way to go.
- echelon 2y ago
  Is there anyone even close to Waymo in this game? Is Waymo going to own the entire market?
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Why would waymo own the entire market? Sure, they might be the first ones there, but every year recreating what is "good enough" should be cheaper and cheaper.
  - krupan 2y ago
    Cruise is close to Wayno, but nobody is willing to invest in Cruise anymore
    - AlotOfReading 2y ago
      Cruise doesn't exist anymore (or rather shortly won't). The teams are being folded into GM to work on other things.
  - 05 2y ago
    Baidu Apollo. They also have a commercial fleet without in-car safety drivers (they use remote operators for real time monitoring, though, so hard to say how hands-off it really is)
  - rapsey 2y ago
    Waymo works in US grid cities on highly modified cars. I know people love hating Musk, but it is still very much up in the air if Waymo will be a better solution than what Tesla or Wayve is doing.

ram_rattle 2y ago

I personally think apart from GPU and compute for intelligence for meaningful robotics to take off we still have lot of things to crack like better battery, better affordable sensors, microelectronics etc, I'm pretty sure we will get there but I don't think one company can do it.

01100011 2y ago
Better battery isn't really an issue for factories. Same with sensors if you're saving the cost of employing a human, especially for dangerous work.
- michaelt 2y ago
  True - and of course factories don't mind if a robot costs $40,000 if the payback time is right. But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap. nvidia has several irons in the fire here. Industrial robot? Self-driving car? Creepy humanoid robots? Experimental academic robots? Whatever your needs are, nvidia is ready with a GPU, some software, and some tutorials on the basics.
  - Onavo 2y ago
    > But factory robots haven't propelled Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, UR, Staubli and peers to anything like the levels of success nvidia is already at. A market big enough to accommodate several profitable companies with market caps in the tens of billions might not drive much growth for a company with a trillion-dollar market cap. That's because the past year of robotics advancements (e.g. https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0 https://www.physicalintelligence.company/blog/pi0, https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13196 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.13196) has been driven by advances in machine learning and multimodal foundation models. There has been very little change in the actual electronics and mechanical engineering of robotics. So it's no surprise that the traditional hardware leaders like Kuka and ABB are not seeing massive gains so far. I suspect they might get the Tesla treatment soon when the Chinese competitors like unitree start muscling into the humanoid robotics space. Robotics advancements are now AI driven and software defined. It turned out that adding a camera and tying a big foundation model to a traditional robot is all you need. Wall-E is now experiencing the ImageNet moment.

whatever1 2y ago

What is the new breakthrough in robotics that is gpu driven ? There are subsets of the overall problem that can be solved by a gpu (eg object detection) but the whole planning and control algo scheme seems to be more or less the same as it has been for the past decades. These typically involve non-convex optimization so not much gpu benefit.

pseudosudoer 2y ago
There are search spaces that are quite large that are used in optimal control. GPUs can be used to drastically accelerate finding a solution. As an example, imagine you are given a height map, a 2D discrete search space overlayed in the height map, 4 legs, and robot dynamics for every configuration of the legs in their constrained workspace. Find the optimal toe placement of the 4 legs. Although a GPU isn't designed exactly to deal with this sort of problem, if it's framed as a reduction problem it still significantly out performs a multi core CPU.
- whatever1 2y ago
  These are sparse systems, factorization is not a strength of the gpu architectures. Typically adding more cpu cores is a better investment rather than trying to parallelize it through gpu. Nvidia has been trying for some time to make progress with cuSparse etc, although not much has been achieved in the space. Maybe they try a completely different approach with reinforcemnt learning and a ton of parallel simulations?
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mattlondon 2y ago
> What is the new breakthrough in robotics that is gpu driven ? There are subsets of the overall problem that can be solved by a gpu (eg object detection) but the whole planning and control algo scheme seems to be more or less the same as it has been for the past decades I think the "object detection" goes quite far beyond the classic "objection detection" bounding boxes etc we're used to seeing. So not just a pair of x,y coords for the bounding box for e.g. a mug of coffee in the robot's field of view, but what is the orientation of the mug? where is the handle? If the handle is obscured, can we infer where it might be based on what we understand for what a mug typically looks like and plan our gripper motion towards it (and at 120hz etc)? Is it a solid mug, or a paper cup (affects grip strength/pressure)? Etc etc. Then there is the whole thing about visually show the robot once what you are doing, and it automatically "programs" itself to repeat the tasks in a generalised way etc. Then you could probably spawn 100 startups just on hooking up a LLM to tell a robot what to do in a residential setting (make me a coffee, clear up the kitchen, take out the trash etc) This has all been possible before of course, but could it be done "on device" in a power efficient way? I am guessing they are hoping to sell a billion or two chips + boards to be built directly into things to do so so that your next robotic vacuum or lawn mower or whatever will be able to respond to you yelling at it and not mangle your pets/small children in the process. I eagerly await the day when I have a plug and play robot platform that can tell the difference between my young children and a fox, and attack the fox shitting/shredding something small and fluffy in the garden but ignore the kids

asadalt 2y ago

if they really want to bet on robotics, I want them to release a $10 variant of jetson board.

adrian_b 2y ago
A few weeks ago they have reduced the price of the Orin Nano development kit from $500 to $250, while also increasing a few of the performance limits that cripple it in comparison with the more expensive Orin models. Previously it was far too overpriced for most uses (except for someone developing a certified automotive device), but at the new price and performance it has become competitive with the existing alternatives in the same $150 to $300 price range, which are based on Intel, AMD, MediaTek, Qualcomm or Rockchip CPUs.
- bradfa 2y ago
  When they reduced the price of the dev kit, they priced it below the low volume sales price of the cheapest Orin Nano 4GB module. Presumably the module prices go down when you buy in bulk but for small volumes it was (is still?) cheaper to buy the dev kit and throw away the carrier than to just buy the module. Granted the dev kits went out of stock pretty quick.
jononor 2y ago
For 10 USD you get an ESP32S3 board, which can do basic computer vision tasks. For example using OpenMV or emlearn-micropython. For 15-20 USD you can get a board that includes an OV2640 camera. Examples would be XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, LilyGo T Camera S3 or "ESP32-S3-CAM" board from misc manufacturers.
- asadalt 2y ago
  yes that’s what i am working on these days but there is a need for a generally available neural chip (see google’s coral as one attempt). in my tests, esp32s3 is very very slow for any model with conv2d involved. i just want a tiiiny gpu for $10 so i can run smaller models at higher speed than possible with xtensa/rp2040 having limited simd support etc.

albert_e 2y ago

https://archive.ph/uKeHc https://archive.ph/uKeHc

deleted 2y ago

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cess11 2y ago

Since cops, guards and military officers are itching to get autonomous guns it's probably a reasonable move. The genocide of palestinians has showed that people operated gun drones aren't distance enough, the operators cost a lot in psych treatment and personnel churn.

Qiu_Zhanxuan 2y ago
Unironically, I think this is one of the "main benefits" that the disconnected people in places of power seems to covet. They won't have a human operator that will do their dirty jobs and potentially leaks the truth out of guilt.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  I'm bearish on 'ai war' but this sounds like a huge positive if it comes to fruition because war would become more about two sides trying to kill each each sides leaders, instead of these leaders sending masses of doe eyed young people off to die for them. If politicians had real skin in the game there'd be far less war.
  - cess11 2y ago
    That's already being done. Saddam Hussein was quickly killed, and what followed? Same goes for Ghaddaffi. Israel has killed a lot of leaders and is clearly not satisfied with having done that. What they want is border and population control that involves very few ordinary citizens, in large part in expectation of something like hundreds of millions of climate refugees. After having spent a couple of years killing and maiming poor people with almost nowhere to go you tend to need quite a bit of medical care and usually join the anti-war movement regardless if you got a college degree out of it or not. I find it likely we'll see gun mounted robodog patrols along occidental borders within ten years from now, after having tested it on populations elsewhere.

dankobgd 2y ago

took them 16 years to fix night light bug in the driver but yeah robots are the future

stephc_int13 2y ago

I think that most people are underestimating Nvidia strategy. Their bet is that AI will unlock robotics use and they don't want to be simply compute providers, they want to innovate on the whole chain, software, hardware, services, everything. Their position is quite unique as their R&D is basically financed by their future competitors, they are making bank while going where the puck will be.

nthingtohide 2y ago
I think Nvidia should try to create an compute-analogue of wifi routers where computation will be offloaded to smart-home gpu-servers. This strategy will cement their future for eternity.
- dartos 2y ago
  Why sell to consumers when you can sell to large corporations at 10x the price?
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Because consumers will pay ~3-5x MSRP if the hype is big enough.
    - jszymborski 2y ago
      Corps aren't impervious to hype either.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  Something in that spirit is already making progress: compute attached to cell phone towers, called "edge computing". Because you are pooling computer resources across many more users you have better amortized cost than if you had a workstation on every home that was idle 99% of the time. Of course, latency and bandwidth to the cell tower is worse than wifi, but better than if the compute is done on a remote server. I have no idea of which model will succeed for which use cases, but the idea is sound.

mlepath 2y ago

I have worked with Jetson Orin platform, and honestly Nvidia has something that is really easy to work with there. The Jetsons are basically a full GPU (plus some stuff) at very low power. If I were tasked with building a robot it would likely be the first place I look.

leetrout 2y ago
They are OK. If you need advanced vision - yes, because CUDA. But off the shelf mini PCs are much more user friendly for existing software IME. Thankfully ARM being so wide spread and continuing to grow this wont matter as much.
- blihp 2y ago
  Maybe you've had a different experience with GPU drivers on ARM for Linux than most of the rest of us? (i.e. it's the fact that nVidia actually has Linux support on ARM that is the real appeal)
- talldayo 2y ago
  > But off the shelf mini PCs are much more user friendly for existing software IME. I'd love you to point me in the direction of an off-the-shelf mini PC that has 64gb of addressable memory and CUDA support.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Off-the-shelf mini-PCs with 64 GB of addressable memory and reasonably powerful integrated GPUs, i.e. faster than the smaller Ampere GPUs of the cheaper NVIDIA Orin models, are plenty. On the other hand, if you force the CUDA support condition and any automatic translation of CUDA programs is not accepted as good enough, then this mandates the use of a discrete NVIDIA GPU, which can be provided only by a mini-ITX mini-PC. There are mini-ITX boards with laptop Ryzen 7940HX or 7945HX CPUs, at prices between $400 and $550. To such a board you must add 64 GB of DRAM, e.g. @ $175, and a GPU, e.g. a RTX 4060 at slightly more than $300. Without a discrete GPU, a case for a mini-ITX motherboard has a volume of only 2.5 liter. With a discrete GPU like RTX 4060, the volume of the case must increase to 5 liter (for cases with PCIe extenders, which allow a smaller volume than typical mini-ITX cases). So your CUDA condition still allows what can be considered an off-the-shelf mini-PC, but mandating CUDA raises the volume from the 0.5 L of a NUC-like mini-PC to 5 L and the price is also raised 2 or 3 times. This of course unless you choose an Orin for CUDA support, but that will not give you 64 GB of DRAM, because NVIDIA has never provided enough memory in any of their products, unless you accept to pay a huge overprice.

leetrout 2y ago

Now if we could get a robotics platform like ROS that actually cares about modern dev patterns and practices from dev's slapping keyboards through production deployment with decent smoke tests, easy versioned artifacts and no need to understand linux packaging details... Coming from web / app dev this was my very least favorite part of working on the software side of robotics with ROS.

alephnerd 2y ago
> Coming from web / app dev this was my very least favorite part of working on the software side of robotics with ROS To be brutally honest, you aren't the primary persona in the robotics space. If you have limited resources (as any organization does), the PM for DevEx will target customers with the best "bang-for-buck" from a developer effort to revenue standpoint. Most purchasers and users in the robotics and hardware space tend to be experienced players in the hardware, aerospace, and MechE world, which has different patterns and priorities from a purely software world. If there is a case to be made that there is a significant untapped market, it makes sense for someone like you to go it on your own and create an alternate offering via your own startup.

scottLobster 2y ago

Sounds like NVIDIA doesn't know what the hell the future is going to look like but hopes it's something to do with robotics, and is taking some the boatloads of money from the past few years to build out product lines for every conceivable robotics need. Good for them I guess. The article references a "ChatGPT moment" for physical robotics, but honestly I think the Chat GPT moment has kind of come and gone, and the world still runs largely as it ever did. Probably not the best analogy, unless they're just talking about buckets of VC money flowing into the space to fund lots of bad ideas, which would be good for NVIDIA financially. As an admitted non-expert in this field, I guess the one thing that really annoys me about articles like this is the lack of a concrete vision. It's like Boston Dynamics and their dancing robots, which while impressive, haven't really amounted to much outside of the lab. The last thing I remember reading was a military prototype to carry stuff for infantry that ended up being turned down because it was too loud. The article even confirms this general perspective, ending with "As of right now, we don’t have very effective tools for verifying the safety and reliability properties of machine learning systems, especially in robotics. This is a major open scientific question in the field,” said Rosen." So whatever robot you're developing is incredibly complex, to be trusted with heavy machinery or around consumers directly, while being neither verifiably safe nor reliable. Sorry, but almost everything in this article sounds like a projection of AI-hype onto physical robotics, with all the veracity of "this is good for Bitcoin". Sounds like NVIDIA is doing right by its shareholders though.

akutlay 2y ago

I just finished reading Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book “Power and Progress” where they talk about how the leaders in the technology space is (unfortunately) able to set the direction of the technology according to their goals, not humanity’s goals. This is an excellent example of such power. NVIDIA wants to expand its business and pushes the industry to use more and more AI, which highly depends on their cards. Now all the VCs put billions of dollars towards this goal, thousands of Phds spend all their time, and companies change direction of business to catch the AI hype. Not necessarily because we decided this is the best for humanity, just because it’s the best for NVIDIA.

EarthIsHome 2y ago

The ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, and other hyped usecases have been the driving force for Nvidia: it injected huge sums of money into their R&D, which also stimulated the economy as developers ran to build build build in order to keep up with the demand for datacenters, which in turn required more infrastructure building to satiate the thirst and power needs of datacenters, etc. Before, ChatGPT, I recall the hype was blockchain, crypto, and NFTs; and maybe before that, it was "big data." As the LLM, generative AI, etc. bubble begins to deflate due to investors and companies finding it hard to make profits from those AI usecases, Nvidia needs to pivot. This article indicates that Nvidia is hedging on robotics as the next driving force that will continue to sustain the massive interest in their products. Personally, I don't see how robotics can maintain that same driving force for their products, and investors will find it hard to squeeze profit out of it, and they'll be back to searching for another hype. It's like Nvidia is trying to create a market to justify their products and continued development, similar to what Meta has tried, to spectacular failure, with the Metaverse for their virtual products. After the frenzy that sustained these compute products transitioned from big data, to crypto, and now, to AI, I'm curious what the next jump will be; I don't think the "physical AI" space of robotics can sustain Nvidia in the way that they're hoping.

infecto 2y ago
The part that is hard for me to parse is there is hype but there is also a significant amount of value being extracted by using LLMs and other products coming from this new wave. Everytime I read opinions like yours it’s hard to make sense of it because there is value in the tooling that exists. It cannot be applied to everything and anything but it does exist.
gmays 2y ago
Comparing AI to crypto doesn't really work due to the utility of AI. If you believe that there haven't been meaningful use cases from the recent generative AI surge, then you might be out of touch. On the investment side, it's hard to say that since ROIC is still generally up and to the right. As long as that continues, so will investment. Then biggest gap I see is expected if you look at past trends like mobile and the internet: In the first wave of new tech there's a lot of trying to do the old things in the new way, which often fails or gives incremental improvements at best. This is why the 'new' companies seem to be doing the best. I've been shocked at so many new AI startups generating millions in revenue so quickly (billions with OpenAI, but that's a special case). It's because they're not shackled to past products, business models, etc. However, there are plenty of enterprise companies trying to integrate AI into existing workflows and failing miserably. Just like when they tried to retrofit factories with electricity. It's not just plug and play in most cases, you need new workflows, etc. That will take years and there will be plenty more failures. The level of investment is staggering though, and might we see a crash at some point? Maybe, but likely not for a while since there's still so much white space. The hardest thing with new technologies like this is not to confuse the limits of our imagination with the limits of reality (and that goes both ways).

bfrog 2y ago

What breakthrough are people expecting in robotics I wonder?