Hello all,
I hope this post finds you well. I am a representative of the FIRST Robotics team 5104 (The BreakerBots). We are a 501c3 non-profit high school robotics team focused on developing future STEM innovators through the FIRST robotics competition.
One of our core pursuits is exposing our students to innovative technologies and industry solutions, particularly in the realm of computer vision. Over the last several months we have been hard at work integrating a kindly donated Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit and Stereo Camera with our robot, with truly astounding results. Using the Jetson’s CUDA acceleration capabilities, we built a combined NN inference and stereo depth extraction stack that enabled us to, in real-time, track objects around our robot through 3d space. In short, the Jetson platform has opened an entire realm of possibilities for our team.
Unfortunately, we have long since reached the limits of the performance our Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit can deliver, and while our high-speed application significantly favors the performance advantages of the Jetson Orin NX platform, being the high school team we are, we simply do not have the funds to purchase it. As such, we were wondering if it would be possible for NVIDIA to provide some assistance to our team in exposing our students to these wonderful technologies?
Attached below is an example of our Jetson Orin Nano Developer Kit test platform running an in-house trained and CUDA accelerated, YOLOv8m model, detecting both other robots and game pieces, along with their relative 3d positions. Additionally attached is an example depicts our system constructing a real time point cloud map of is surroundings. All of the depth extraction was made possible by a stereo depth camera.
Best regards,
Roman A., Team 5104 Software and Control Systems Design Lead