Nvidia prices AI and robotics starter kit at $59 for hobbyists and students

Nvidia has expanded the Jetson artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge platform, which ranges up to advanced platforms for fully autonomous machines, with an entry-level developer kit priced at $59. The new Jetson Nano 2B AI and robotics starter kit opens the potential of AI and robotics to a new generation of students, educators and hobbyists, said Nvidia.

Enabling hands-on learning in areas such as robotics and intelligent IoT at an affordable price, the Jetson Nano  2GB Developer Kit is supported by the NVIDIA JetPack SDK, which comes with NVIDIA container runtime and a full Linux software development environment. Nvidia said “this allows developers to package their applications for Jetson with all its dependencies into a single container that is designed to work in any deployment.”

In addition, it is powered by the same NVIDIA CUDA-X accelerated computing stack used to create AI products for applications such as self-driving cars, industrial IoT, healthcare, and smart cities. The company also announced the availability of free online training and AI-certification programs to supplement the open-source projects, how-tos, and videos contributed by thousands of developers in the Jetson community.

The Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit will be available at the end of the October through NVIDIA’s distribution channels.

Last year, Nvidia released a $99 AI computer, packing 472 GFLOPS of compute performance for running AI workloads while consuming as little as 5 W. The Jetson Nano AI computer developer kit is available in two versions: the $99 dev kit for developers, makers, and enthusiasts and the $129 production-ready module to create mass-market edge systems.