Nvidia aims Jetson AGX Xavier at powering everything from drones to clever robots

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NVIDIA HAS EXPANDED the Jetson family with the addition of the Jetson AGX Xavier module, design for adding smarts into all manner of autonomous machines.

Essentially a data wrangling server plonked onto a silicon package, Jetson AGX Xavier is designed to handle all the tech and processing that autonomous things need to go about their robot lives, such as image processing and computer vision and the inference of deep learning algorithms.

With the new platform, Nvidia expects it to be used in machines ranging from self-driving cars to delivery robots and autonomous drones.

"Developers can use Jetson AGX Xavier to build the autonomous machines that will solve some of the world's toughest problems, and help transform a broad range of industries. Millions are expected to come onto the market in the years ahead," said Murali Gopalakrishna, head of product management of the intelligent machines division at Nvidia.

In terms of performance the module offers up to 32 trillion operations per second of performance and its new artificial intelligence capabilities means it offers a heck of a lot better performance than older Jetson chips and platforms.

All that performance is delivered from a chip that has a power draw that can be as little as 10Wm, which makes Jetson AGX Xavier a power-efficient platform that could be embedded into machines that are expected to be away from a power source for some time., say compact drones and robots.

But don't go expecting to buy a Jetson AGX Xavier and start creating your own smart robot, unless you have very deep pockets, as you'll need to cough up $1,099 per unit if you buy them at a volume of 1,000+. But then that's expected as the module is really aimed at autonomous machine makers creating robots and drones for industrial use.

The whole thing once again demonstrates how Nvidia is more than just a fancy graphics card maker an has put a heck of a lot of work into creating hardware that will underpin future autonomous tech. µ