Announced earlier this year at the company's GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia Isaac is a platform for developing robots for manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, construction and other industries.

The hardware piece of the platform is Nvidia's Jetson Xavier, said to be the world's first computer designed specifically for robotics.

It includes a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, dual Nvidia deep learning accelerators, an image processor, a vision processor, and a video processor.

Together, they deliver more than 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second) and allow dozens of algorithms to be processed concurrently for real-time sensor processing, vision, localisation and mapping, and path planning, among other functions.

The software provided by Nvidia comprises:

• Isaac SDK: APIs and tools to develop robotics algorithm software and runtime framework with fully accelerated libraries.
• Isaac IMX (Intelligent Machine Acceleration): a collection of Nvidia-developed robotics algorithm software.
• Isaac Sim: a simulation environment for developers to train autonomous machines and perform hardware-in-the-loop testing with Jetson Xavier.

"AI is the most powerful technology force of our time," said Nvidia founder and chief executive Jensen Huang.

"Its first phase will enable new levels of software automation that boost productivity in many industries. Next, AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines. Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics, and much more."

The Nvidia Jetson Xavier developer kit including the Isaac will cost US$1299. It will be available to developers on the early access list in August.