AI Weekly: CES 2022, Autonomous Tractors, Color-Changing Cars, and NVIDIA's Free Metaverse
TL;DR
CES 2022 was the first hybrid in-person/virtual CES since the pandemic. The AI highlights: John Deere showed a fully autonomous tractor running on NVIDIA Jetson GPUs and 50 million training images. NVIDIA made Omniverse free for individual creators. BMW unveiled a car that changes color using E Ink. And a Taiwanese lab debuted the world's first collaborative robot with built-in 3D vision. The theme of the show: AI leaving the lab and entering the physical world.
John Deere's Autonomous Tractor Steals the Show
A tractor stole CES. That sentence alone tells you where AI is headed.
John Deere unveiled its first fully autonomous tractor: six stereo cameras, 360-degree obstacle detection, and a deep neural network running on two NVIDIA Jetson GPUs. It classifies every pixel in the camera feed within 100 milliseconds to decide whether to keep plowing or stop for an obstacle.
The training data behind it: 50 million images of fields in various states, collected over three years. That's not a research demo. That's production-grade computer vision applied to agriculture.
The farmer's role? Transport the tractor to the field, swipe right on a mobile app, and walk away. The machine runs 24/7, rain or shine, planting seeds or spraying herbicide within an inch of accuracy. When AI folks talk about "real-world deployment," this is what they mean. Not another chatbot, but a multi-ton machine operating autonomously in unstructured environments.
NVIDIA Omniverse Goes Free
NVIDIA made Omniverse generally available as a free download for individual GeForce RTX and NVIDIA RTX GPU users. Nearly 100,000 users had already downloaded the beta.
Omniverse is NVIDIA's platform for collaborative 3D world-building: think Google Docs but for 3D scenes. The new Nucleus Cloud feature lets creators in different locations share and co-edit massive 3D environments without transferring huge datasets.
The AI angle: Audio2Face, an AI-enabled app that instantly animates a 3D face from just an audio track, now with blendshape support and direct export to Epic's MetaHuman Creator. Feed it a voice recording, get a lip-synced animated face. The implications for game development, film, and virtual production are obvious.
With connectors to 14 applications including Autodesk Maya, 3ds Max, and Unreal Engine, NVIDIA is positioning Omniverse as the operating system for the metaverse. Whether the metaverse materializes is debatable. That NVIDIA is giving away the tools for free tells you they're betting on the ecosystem play.
BMW's Color-Changing Car
The BMW iX Flow was the show's crowd magnet. A full-size SUV wrapped in E Ink panels that shifts from white to black (and any gradient between) at the touch of a button.
Each panel contains millions of microcapsules, roughly the width of a human hair, filled with negatively-charged white pigments and positively-charged black pigments. Apply electricity, the chosen color rises to the surface. No power needed to maintain the color, only to change it.
The practical argument: white exteriors reflect heat (less AC needed), black exteriors retain it (less heating). Dynamic color adaptation based on conditions could meaningfully reduce EV energy consumption. The real argument: it looks incredible and BMW knows how to generate press.
AI Robots and Healthcare
Two more announcements worth tracking:
ITRI's RGB-D AI Robot won a CES 2022 Innovation Award as the world's first collaborative robot with built-in 3D vision. The 3D vision sensing tech reduces sensor size by 168x while boosting sensing speed by 38.6x compared to previous approaches. That's the kind of miniaturization that moves robots from factory floors to workbenches.
Bosch and Highmark Health announced a partnership to use AI and novel sensor technologies for detecting pediatric pulmonary disorders like asthma. The approach uses AI to analyze audio patterns captured through a stethoscope, essentially teaching a machine to hear what experienced physicians hear. Low-cost, non-invasive, and scalable to any clinic with a stethoscope and a phone.
Key Takeaways
- John Deere's autonomous tractor is the most impressive real-world AI deployment at CES 2022: 6 cameras, 2 NVIDIA GPUs, 50M training images, fully autonomous field operation
- NVIDIA Omniverse goes free for individual users with 100K beta downloads already, plus AI-powered Audio2Face for instant 3D facial animation from audio
- BMW iX Flow uses E Ink for a color-changing exterior: part spectacle, part genuine energy efficiency innovation for EVs
- CES 2022's AI theme: physical-world applications over software demos. Tractors, robots, and cars, not chatbots
- Healthcare AI continues its quiet march with Bosch using AI-powered audio analysis for pediatric respiratory diagnostics
Sources: Robotics 24/7: John Deere CES 2022, TechCrunch: NVIDIA Omniverse, BMW iX Flow, Analytics India Mag: Top 5 AI Announcements at CES 2022