Nvidia and Yamaha team up to develop autonomous farm machinery

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang made the announcement at GTC Japan in Tokyo. In reality it means that Yamaha Motor will include Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Xavier platform as the development system for autonomous machines.

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Yamaha Motor has selected NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier as the development system to power its upcoming lineup of autonomous machines for land, air and sea. #GTC18 https://t.co/bn1TXQV8ll pic.twitter.com/3PRYWH0o3F

— NVIDIA Embedded (@NVIDIAEmbedded) 13 September 2018

Jetson AGX Xavier is first computer for AI

According to Yamaha, Jetson AGX Xavier is the world’s first computer created for AI, robotics and edge computing, that will enable to automate a wide range of Yamaha’s products by making them more intelligent.

Target products include unmanned ground vehicles, which support automation of agricultural processes such as fruit picking; low-speed vehicles based on golf carts, used for “last mile” transportation of people and logistics; and industrial robots and drones. The company expects to begin testing these devices next year, with the goal of a public launch in 2020.

‘Deep learning can teach intelligent machines how to recognise diverse types of plants, vegetables, fruit, diseases, and insects’

“Agriculture is incredibly difficult because every plant and every fruit and every vegetable looks different”, says Jensen Huang. “It is impossible for a human to write software to recognise every broccoli, every lettuce, every cabbage; it’s not possible. But deep learning can teach these intelligent machines how to recognise all of the world’s complicated, diverse types of plants, vegetables, fruit, diseases, and insects”, Huang said. “It’s now possible for us to teach AI these things.”