BMW is making their automotive factories smarter by teaming up with NVIDIA whose Isaac robotics platform will enhance logistics and bring 5 AI enabled robots to improve workflow.
BMW is looking to enhance their factory logistics to produce custom configured care more rapidly. Once the system has been refined, BMW plans to roll out the system world wide to all their factories.
In a search to deliver higher volumes of customized cars, BMW will need to be able to improve its factory logistics. Millions of parts flow into a factory from more than 4,500 supplier sites with 230,000 unique part numbers. With over 100 different options available, 99% of orders are unique. Autonomous AI-powered logistics robots will assist the current production process to order to assemble highly customized vehicles on the same production line.
BMW will use NVIDIA’s Isaac robotics platform to develop five AI-enabled robots to improve their logistics workflow. They are powered by a variety of NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier and EGX edge computers. These include both navigation robots to transport material autonomously, as well as manipulation robots to select and organize parts.
According to the press release”
Developed on the NVIDIA Isaac SDK, the robots utilize a number of powerful deep neural networks, addressing perception, segmentation, pose estimation and human pose estimation to perceive their environment, detect objects, navigate autonomously and move objects. These robots are trained both on real and synthetic data using NVIDIA GPUs to render ray-traced machine parts in a variety of lighting and occlusion conditions to augment real data.
The real and synthetic data are then used to train deep neural networks on NVIDIA DGX systems. The robots are then continuously tested in NVIDIA’s Isaac Simulators for both navigation and manipulation, operating on NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, where multiple BMW Group personnel in different geographies can all work in one simulated environment.
Don Dahlmann and I discuss the announcement if you’re keen to learn more about the importance of AI and logistics.
