NVIDIA Isaac AMR

Robots for intralogistics (i.e. moving goods within a warehouse or factory environment) is one of the fastest growing segments in robotics. Robots will operate with increasing autonomy in such highly unstructured and dynamic environments. NVIDIA Isaac AMR (autonomous mobile robots) will enable a fleet of coordinated robots that can function safely and robustly–and collaborate with human counterparts–in emerging environments that are highly unstructured.

To bring next gen autonomy to robots for intralogistics, Isaac AMR will address the following needs.

• Adapt a navigation application to different types of robots. 
• Accelerate the development and management of maps for large environments.
• Simplify robot deployment and robot operations. 

Isaac AMR is a modular platform, built on the foundations of cloud to edge computing platforms from NVIDIA including an AMR Reference Architecture called NOVA
The NOVA Orin Reference robot is called Carter; and, you can learn more about it at Isaac AMR.

The three pillars of Isaac AMR are mapping, autonomy, and simulation. Each of the pillars is being built to be independent of the other. Each of these pillars is further disaggregated into constituent components that are independent of each other - making this platform modular.

In the figure above - green fonts represent a microservice. Further expanding on the main pillars of Isaac AMR:

Mapping consists of:

• A microservice that uses Carter Robot to collect multi sensor time-synchronized data for map creation.
• A cloud based service that generates 3D Map and 2D occupancy maps, and offers tools to add semantic labels to generate semantic maps.

Autonomy consists of:

• A microservice that uses the semantic map (or occupancy maps) to autonomously navigate in the environment.
• A complementary cloud based microservice that uses Map server and cuOpt service to optimize routes for a fleet of robots.

Simulation (can be cloud based as well) includes:

• Use of the “digital-twin” of an environment.
• Sensor simulation of NOVA Sensors.
• Bridge between autonomy stack and Sim to enable hardware-in-loop and software-in-loop testing.

To get Isaac AMR please visit Isaac Autonomous Mobile Robot AMR | NVIDIA Developer and apply for access.