Nvidia unveiled its Jetson TX2 platform to power drones with good artificial intelligence.

The platform includes the Jetson TX2 embedded AI supercomputer, a chip and its surruonding hardware that can power 4K video drones that consumeonly about 7.5 watts of power. Drones with the TX2 solution can operate two cameras simultaneously.

The Jetson 3.0 platform was designed for AI at the edge of the network, rather than in the cloud, or Internet-connected data center. Drones with cameras can capture a huge amount of data.

This means Jetson has to handle a lot of the processing of data at the edge, in the device itself, rather than transferring all of that data to the cloud, said Deepu Talla, vice president and general manager of Nvidias Tegra business unit, at a press event in San Francisco.

Pretty much every industry we know is being transformed by AI, he said. Weve seen an AI version of GO beat the worlds best human.

Services are AI powered too, with things like Amazon Alexa and OK, Google.

All are adopting the Nvidia computing ecosystem, Talla said.

Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said the new platform uses Nvidias latest Parker-based Tegra chips, and can deliver about double the performance of the previous generation of drone chips without increasing the amount of power used.

Above: Teals Jetson-based drone.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Like a car, there are many applications that require a lot of compute power at the edge for machine learning and artificial intelligence, Moorhead said. Based on the quality of their partners, it shows Nvidia has a really good offering.

Thats surprising, since most of Nvidias success has been in things like self-driving cars, he said.

GPU-based deep learning can crunch all of this data much faster than before. Nvidias GPU enhancements and software frameworks have helpedimprove AI by two orders of magnitude. Deep learning training used to take months. Now it takes days or hours.

Deploying neural networks usually happens in the cloud, going from a smartphone to a cloud. Nvidias Tesla can do AI inferencing in the data center.

But with Jetson, Nvidia is migrating AI to the edge. Edge devices like drones often have limited bandwidth, high latency, and a lack of wireless reception.

For confidentially reasons, you dont want to store a lot of data in the cloud, Talla said.

Nvidia has partners such as Fanuc, Toyota, Starship, Cisco, and others. Nvidia makes it easy for them to adopt the tech with its Jetson software developmentkit. It sits on top of Linux and the Tegra processors which Nvidia makes.

Cisco showed the Jetson platform working in a video conferencing display dubbed Spark. It allows for much more processing in the display before it sends the data across the Internet to another video conferencing display in another location.

Teal, a Salt Lake City, Utah-based startup, showed a drone with the Jetson platform in it. The drone, also called Teal, uses deep learning software from another startup called Ziff to recognize images, such as people. It could be used in a search and rescue operation, flying over a wide territory and reporting back only when it finds a possible human in a remote area. The drone will cost about $1,200.

Lowes is also using a Jetson-based robot from a company called Navii. The robot is used in stores to scan shelves to see what has to be replaced from inventory. It can also guide shoppers around to different products in the store, using voice recognition.

Nvidia launched its first Jetson platform about 18 months ago. Now the company is adding more AI capabilities on top of Jetson. The Jetson TX1 hardware can deliver 4K video decoding and other high-performance parallel computing tasks. But he Jetson TX2 hardware can double down on the tech capabilities.

TheTX2 developer kit costs $600 at retail, and it costs $300 for education applications. It is available for preorder now in the U.S. and Europe andwill ship in those territories on March 14. It will ship in April in Asia and other regions.

Rivals include Intel, which makes both chips and drones. Kevin Krewell, analyst at Tirias Research, said that Nvidias solution has wider flexibility and is likely targeted at more high-end solutions, while Intel targets both mid-range and high-end drones.

Talla said that the high-end of the market where Nvidia plays is a good market opportunity, and while you pay more for solutions at the edge, you save on a lot of data processing that happens in the data center because you are sending pre-processed information onward, rather than raw data.

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