A pair of droids from the Star Wars franchise came to life and stole everyone’s thunder at the recently concluded Nvidia GTC 2024 event.
GTC is an annual conference hosted by tech giant Nvidia that brings developers, researchers, engineers, and other IT professionals together.
Attendees discuss AI, data science, autonomous machinery, and machine learning topics.
This year’s event featured presentations from high-profile keynote resource speakers, including Nvidia’s chief executive officer (CEO) Jensen Huang.
Huang’s speech focused primarily on Nvidia’s upcoming corporate partnerships and the next-gen chip that succeeds the H100.
However, the highlight came at the end of the keynote presentation when Huang called to stage two special guests. These “guests” turned out to be fully automated BD droids from Star Wars.
Huang explained that the two droids, whom they named Orange and Green BD-X, carry the Nvidia Jetson Nano developer kits.
These are computers explicitly designed to act as central processing units for applications and devices powered by artificial intelligence.
The Nvidia CEO added that the Jetson Nanos worked with Nvidia’s proprietary Isaac Sim robotics simulation platform to teach the two BD units to walk as they did during the presentation.
The two robots also showed the capability to respond to Huang's commands, although Green hilariously refused to come closer when the CEO asked him to.
Orange also spoke as if to introduce itself, but the language was that of the droids in Star Wars, so no translation was available.
Last year, visitors to Walt Disney World spotted these two BD droids and a third blue variant walking around at the entertainment park’s Galaxy’s Edge section.
This was after Disney Research unveiled these bipedal robots during the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.
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