Nvidia’s Videogame Tech Is Being Used to Help Robots Pack Chicken Breasts

Nvidia has given us a look at the soft robotics it’s helping to develop in the food industry, and it happens to be RTX Enabled. Now, don’t get it twisted. Soft Robotics happens to be the name of the company that Nvidia is working with, and what they’re creating is a form of… soft robotics. The company is a member of the Nvidia Inception program, and recently received $26 million in Series C funding from Tyson Ventures, Marel and Johnsonville Ventures. Soft robotics is robotics that focuses on a soft, deft touch or soft materials, usually with a focus on ‘soft bodies’, dissimilar to our own, like snakes or octopi. There are several different ways that soft robotics can take shape, from robotic fabrics to xenobots, and it even has subcategories like necrobotics. And the work that Soft Robotics focuses on is automated high-speed picking solutions using soft robotic grippers. If deployed in a food packing environment, it could potentially save hours of work and automate an industry that previously required a deft touch, with the robotic grippers capable of 100 grips per minute. If you’d like an example, check out this video of the robot accurately estimating the right grip for pieces of chicken, though I recommend not watching it if you don’t want to look at raw meat. “We’re selling the hands, the eyes and the brains of the picking solution,” senior director of software engineering at Soft Robotics David Weatherwax said. “We’re all in on Omniverse [Nvidia’s 3D visualisation program] and Isaac Sim, and that’s been working great for us.” To pull this off, the company uses the Nvidia Isaac Sim, a platform that “powers photorealistic, physically accurate virtual environments”. Instead of identifying a bread roll, for example, as a physical object, the Nvidia Isaac Sim helps to quantify its physical properties and what the accurate pressure for a grip would be, using the Nvidia Omniverse platform, the Isaac Sim and by taking thousands of images of the food object. Pose estimation models (for the gripping claw) are also calculated, and tools, such as Nvidia RTX ray tracing, are used to factor in things such as light glare on the sides of some foods (like wet chicken). “A key thing for us is the lighting, so the Nvidia RTX-driven ray tracing is really important,” added Weatherwax. Anyway, Soft Robotics currently supports Tyson Foods and Johnsonville in the U.S. with robotic food packaging solutions. It’s pretty exciting to see this stuff get developed, although I do veer on the side of caution when it comes to automating industries previously best suited for a careful human touch.

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