Milwaukee-based Rockwell Automation, a manufacturer of industrial automation and digital transformation products, is deepening its partnership with Santa Clara, California-based semiconductor designer Nvidia.
Nvidia designs graphics processing units (GPU) and application programming interfaces (APIs) for data science and high-performance computing. The company is worth $2.2 trillion and held approximately 80% of the global market share in GPU semiconductor chips as of 2023. These chips are needed for AI and machine learning applications.
In a Monday announcement, Rockwell said it is now partnering with Nvidia to “supercharge” the development of safer and smarter industrial AI robots.
This follows a March announcement that both companies would be working together to “evolve the manufacturing industry” by increasing the scale and scope of AI in manufacturing.
The expanded partnership now involves robotics. Specifically, the companies are working to increase the use of AI in autonomous mobile robots in the hopes that the technology can improve business performance and efficiency.
Rockwell’s autonomous mobile robots and production automation applications will be integrated with Nvidia’s “Isaac” robotics platform.
“We’re invigorated by this continued collaboration with Nvidia,” said Ryan Gariepy, chief technology officer at OTTO Motors by Rockwell Automation. “Rockwell’s industrial AI expertise, combined with Nvidia AI and robotics technologies, is going to help drive an exciting new generation of autonomous mobile robots.”
Rockwell is also still working to integrate Nvidia Omniverse Cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) with its Emulate3D software. Both companies hope this integration will bring users data interoperability, live collaboration, and photo-realistic graphics rendering for designing, building, and operating industrial-scale digital twins of production systems.
