The last time I’d spoken with the NVIDIA at any length about robotics was also the last time we featured Claire Delaunay on stage at our Sessions event. That was a while ago. She left the company last July to work with startups and do investing. In fact, she returned to the TechCrunch stage at Disrupt two weeks back to discuss her work as a board advisor for the ag tech firm Farm-ng. Not that Nvidia is desperate for positive reinforcement after its last several earnings reports, but it warrants pointing out how well the company’s robotics strategy has paid off in recent years. Nvidia pumped a lot into the category at a time when mainstreaming robotics beyond manufacturing still seemed like a pipe dream for many. April marks a decade since the launch of the TK1. Nvidia described the offering thusly at the time, “Jetson TK1 brings the capabilities of Tegra K1 to developers in a compact, low-power platform that makes development as simple as developing on a PC.” This February, the company noted, “A million developers across the globe are now using the Nvidia Jetson platform for edge AI and robotics to build innovative technologies. Plus, more than 6,000 companies — a third of which are startups — have integrated the platform with their products.” You would be hard-pressed to find a robotics developer who hasn’t spent time with the platform, and frankly it’s remarkable how users run the gamut from hobbyists to multinational corporations. That’s the kind of spread companies like Arduino would kill for.
Full opinion : How NVIDIA became a major player in robotics.
