Humanoid robot cuts model processing delay 8x with NVIDIA tech in internal tests

What happened

They do not mean the robot moves eight times faster or completes physical tasks eight times sooner. Bear Robotics, which develops robots for commercial operations, announced KINO-2 at NVIDIA GTC Berlin. NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, and its products and services include graphics processing units and software.

Bear Robotics says it has reduced the time needed to run a robotics foundation model by roughly eight times, from 500 milliseconds to 60 milliseconds, using NVIDIA software on its KR1 humanoid (a robot built in roughly human shape) robot. The improvement comes through KINO-2, a new robot-learning platform designed to turn human demonstrations into tasks that KR1 can perform.

The company reported a separate 4.2-fold improvement for its own model, reducing processing time from 72.3 milliseconds to 17.2 milliseconds. The figures come from Bear’s internal measurements and refer to model inference (running a trained model to get an answer, rather than training it), the process of generating an output from a trained model.