Wind River reported Apr. 17 that Yaskawa Electric Corp. is using its Wind River Linux to develop its Motoman Next robot, which is capable of autonomous adaptivity to its environment, and can make AI-enabled judgments. Motoman Next also uses Nvidia’s Jetson Orin modules to add intelligence and autonomy; handle challenging tasks in unstructured environments; and allow automation to serve in applications that were previously challenging to automate because they needed human-level perception and judgment. Wind River Linux operates as an autonomous control unit, and runs on Jetson Orin.
“We’re pleased to support AI-capable robotics from Yaskawa in combination with Wind River Linux and Nvidia Jetson,” says Amit Ronen, chief customer officer at Wind River. “Together with Yaskawa and Nvidia, we can help teams rapidly innovate in machine learning (ML) and AI to deliver more intelligent systems.”
Motoman Next can execute tasks based on its judgment of changes in the surrounding environment and its system status, including accounting for other robots and peripheral devices. It can perform tasks that previously required human recognition skills and judgment, such as navigating an optimal path to avoid obstacles, or sorting and boxing items of varying color and shape, as well as tasks with many variables and uncertain elements.
As a platform for edge AI, embedded and robotics applications, Nvidia Jetson provides scalable software, a modern AI stack, production-ready ROS packages, and application-specific AI workflows. It can share AI software and cloud-native workflows, while delivering power-efficient performance required for building software-defined autonomous machines and edge-AI solutions.
