en.Wedoany.com Reported - NVIDIA unveiled the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference humanoid robot during its GTC keynote in Taipei, providing a standardized platform for academic robotics teams to collect data, train policies, conduct simulation testing, and deploy skills.

The robot, co-developed by China's Unitree Robotics and Singapore's Sharpa, represents NVIDIA's strategic expansion in physical AI: offering not only chips but also the software, workflows, and reference hardware needed to develop general-purpose humanoid robots.

NVIDIA announced that this open-source reference design is part of its Isaac GR00T development platform. The system integrates Unitree's H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa's Wave tactile five-fingered hand, NVIDIA's Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard computer, and Isaac GR00T open-source software and models.

NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated in the announcement that humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world's largest industries, unlocking trillions of dollars in economic opportunities. He also emphasized, "The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference humanoid robot provides researchers with a unified open-source platform to achieve breakthrough discoveries in general physical intelligence."

According to NVIDIA, the robot stands nearly 6 feet tall and weighs approximately 150 pounds. It features 31 degrees of freedom across the body, with Sharpa's hands adding 22 degrees of freedom each, totaling 75 degrees of freedom for the entire body and hands. The reference design also includes multi-view perception, equipped with a head-mounted stereo camera, wrist cameras, and an inertial measurement unit for motion tracking. The Jetson AGX Thor T5000 module delivers 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, 128GB of shared memory, and uses the Blackwell GPU for control and data processing.

The Isaac GR00T platform aims to provide a more unified humanoid robot development workflow, including Isaac Teleop for collecting demonstration data, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and policy training, Isaac ROS for deployment, and Jetson Thor for real-time inference. According to the South China Morning Post, Huang said during the keynote: "For agent systems, robotic systems, and physical AI, data is the hardest problem." Researchers will retain control over robot data, training data, telemetry data, and logs.

Institutions such as Ai2, ETH Zurich, the Stanford Robotics Center, and the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory at the University of California San Diego are expected to use the reference design. The South China Morning Post noted that Sharpa founder David Li Yifan described the collaboration as "a meaningful step toward deploying robots capable of performing real-world tasks in authentic environments."

NVIDIA executives told Reuters that the company also plans to collaborate with humanoid robot manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and South Korea, not limited to Unitree. The company is adding safety features to the robot architecture, including secure boot and confidential computing technologies, to help prevent the execution of malicious code and protect sensitive data.

The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T reference humanoid robot will be available from Unitree by the end of 2026, and the Isaac GR00T reference workflow for Unitree's G1 is expected to be released on GitHub and Hugging Face soon. Unitree plans to increase humanoid robot shipments from approximately 5,500 units last year to 20,000 units in 2026.

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