NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano Developer Kit at the 2019 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC), a $99 computer available now for embedded designers, researchers, and DIY makers, delivering the power of modern AI in a compact, easy-to-use platform with full software programmability. Jetson Nano delivers 472 GFLOPS of compute performance with a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU and a 128-core integrated NVIDIA GPU. It also includes 4GB LPDDR4 memory in an efficient, low-power package with 5W/10W power modes and 5V DC input.

The newly released JetPack 4.2 SDK provides a complete desktop Linux environment for Jetson Nano based on Ubuntu 18.04 with accelerated graphics, support for NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 10.0, and libraries such as cuDNN 7.3 and TensorRT 5.The SDK also includes the ability to natively install popular open source Machine Learning (ML) frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe, Keras, and MXNet, along with frameworks for computer vision and robotics development like OpenCV and ROS.

Full compatibility with these frameworks and NVIDIA’s leading AI platform makes it easier than ever to deploy AI-based inference workloads to Jetson. Jetson Nano brings real-time computer vision and inferencing across a wide variety of complex Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. These capabilities enable multi-sensor autonomous robots, IoT devices with intelligent edge analytics, and advanced AI systems. Even transfer learning is possible for re-training networks locally onboard Jetson Nano using the ML frameworks.

The Jetson Nano Developer Kit fits in a footprint of just 80x100mm and features four high-speed USB 3.0 ports, MIPI CSI-2 camera connector, HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.3, Gigabit Ethernet, M.2 Key-E module, MicroSD card slot, and 40-pin GPIO header. The ports and GPIO header works out-of-the-box with a variety of popular peripherals, sensors, and ready-to-use projects, such as the 3D-printable deep learning JetBot that NVIDIA has open-sourced on GitHub.

The devkit boots from a removable MicroSD card which can be formatted and imaged from any PC with an SD card adapter. The devkit can be conveniently powered via either the Micro USB port or a 5V DC barrel jack adapter. The camera connector is compatible with affordable MIPI CSI sensors including modules based on the 8MP IMX219, available from Jetson ecosystem partners. Also supported is the Raspberry Pi Camera Module v2, which includes driver support in JetPack. Table 1 shows key specifications.

Deep Learning Inference Benchmarks

Jetson Nano can run a wide variety of advanced networks, including the full native versions of popular ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, Caffe/Caffe2, Keras, MXNet, and others. These networks can be used to build autonomous machines and complex AI systems by implementing robust capabilities such as image recognition, object detection and localization, pose estimation, semantic segmentation, video enhancement, and intelligent analytics.

Figure 3 shows results from inference benchmarks across popular models available online. See here for the instructions to run these benchmarks on your Jetson Nano. The inferencing used batch size 1 and FP16 precision, employing NVIDIA’s TensorRT accelerator library included with JetPack 4.2. Jetson Nano attains real-time performance in many scenarios and is capable of processing multiple high-definition video streams.

DNR (did not run) results occurred frequently due to limited memory capacity, unsupported network layers, or hardware/software limitations. Fixed-function neural network accelerators often support a relatively narrow set of use-cases, with dedicated layer operations supported in hardware, with network weights and activations required to fit in limited on-chip caches to avoid significant data transfer penalties. They may fall back on the host CPU to run layers unsupported in hardware and may rely on a model compiler that supports a reduced subset of a framework (TFLite, for example).

Jetson Nano’s flexible software and full framework support, memory capacity, and unified memory subsystem, make it able to run a myriad of different networks up to full HD resolution, including variable batch sizes on multiple sensor streams concurrently. These benchmarks represent a sampling of popular networks, but users can deploy a wide variety of models and custom architectures to Jetson Nano with accelerated performance. And Jetson Nano is not just limited to DNN inferencing. Its CUDA architecture can be leveraged for computer vision and Digital Signal Processing (DSP), using algorithms including FFTs, BLAS, and LAPACK operations, along with user-defined CUDA kernels.

Multi-Stream Video Analytics

Jetson Nano processes up to eight HD full-motion video streams in real-time and can be deployed as a low-power edge intelligent video analytics platform for Network Video Recorders (NVR), smart cameras, and IoT gateways. NVIDIA’s DeepStream SDK optimizes the end-to-end inferencing pipeline with ZeroCopy and TensorRT to achieve ultimate performance at the edge and for on-premises servers. The video below shows Jetson Nano performing object detection on eight 1080p30 streams simultaneously with a ResNet-based model running at full resolution and a throughput of 500 megapixels per second (MP/s).

JetBot

NVIDIA JetBot shown in figure 5 is a new open source autonomous robotics kit that provides all the software and hardware plans to build an AI-powered deep learning robot for under $250. The hardware materials include Jetson Nano, IMX219 8MP camera, 3D-printable chassis, battery pack, motors, I2C motor driver, and accessories.