Meeting Every Robot at Nvidia GTC: What the Future May Bring
This is my second year of bot hunting at Nvidia GTC, and I’ve encountered several of them for the first time.
Just as I entered the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, I was greeted by a small robot from IntBot that was tending to the crowd, powered by an AI chatbot and controlled by nearby humans for safety. Another larger IntBot robot sat behind the information desk, giving instructions in multiple languages.
Humanoid, a UK-based company, brought two of its HMND 01 Alpha wheeled robots for a demonstration of “fleet control,” a way for a single person to easily control multiple robots. I ordered a drink and a snack via a touchscreen, and the robots busied themselves at the same time, one taking my drink and the other my snack.
Met and ordered HMND 01 Alpha robots from Nvidia GTC to bring me a snack.
This demo was a very simple proof of concept for something that several players in the robotics industry are working on simultaneously. The ability to activate multiple robots with a single command will definitely be useful to people working closely with them. However, it also evokes fear of a robotic army and the chaos it could cause.
Noble Machines brought its bulky Moby 3 robot, designed to lift and carry up to 50 pounds. Its demo was very similar to the one presented by Boston Dynamics at CES earlier this year. The robot performed basic industrial tasks autonomously and a teleoperator was present with a VR headset to assist the robot whenever it encountered a problem. A nearby screen showed viewers in real time whether the robot was operating autonomously or under the control of an operator.
The Reachy Mini is a desktop robot aimed at developers starting at $300.
Moby 3 prioritizes cost-effectiveness, even using a $1 dog chew toy as a gripper instead of the more expensive, over-designed hands on other robots. The company says the pliers do everything they need to do and make them cheaper and easier to replace when needed.
I also got to try out an OpenClaw AI assistant running on a Spark DGC, which was given some extra personality thanks to a Reachy Mini Desktop robot that moved around while the AI agent read its responses. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that OpenClaw AI agents would find their way into robots in some form, and this seemed to be a basic illustration of that.
