The TX1 kit includes an uncased board with all major components on it. It's the size of a credit card but has a 1 teraflop of horsepower.

Jesse Clayton, product manager at Nvidia said that robots and drones require autonomous and smoother navigation capabilities, and the TX1 will help.

The TX1 has 256 graphics cores to process images so that your “plastic pals who are fun to be with” can recognize objects and avoid collisions using "deep-learning" algorithms and image processing engines, Clayton said.

Nvidia is providing a software development kit for theTX1, including a debugger, compiler, libraries and other tools. The SDK will help programmers load applications that allow robots and drones to be truly autonomous.

The SDK is based on Nvidia's CUDA parallel programming framework, and taps into technologies such as OpenCV, OpenVX and Nvidia's VisionWorks for image recognition. The board also supports OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics standards.

The board can connect to more powerful cloud services for post-processing of images, Clayton said.

The TX1 is three times faster than last year's original Jetson board, which delivered 300 gigaflops of horsepower. It uses the Tegra X1 chip which Nvidia is putting under the bonnets of cars and tablets. They use 64-bit ARM CPUs.Additional specifications include 4GB of DDR4 memory, 16GB of storage, Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

The developer board will be available starting on November 16 for $599 through online retailers like Amazon and Newegg. It will initially ship in the U.S. and then worldwide next year.