Nvidia has announced the Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, an open humanoid robot platform designed to accelerate research and development in physical AI and general-purpose robotics.
Unveiled at Nvidia GTC Taipei, the platform combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, Nvidia Jetson Thor onboard computing, and the company’s Isaac GR00T software stack into a single reference design.
The new platform aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing humanoid robotics researchers: the fragmented process of integrating hardware, collecting data, running simulations, training AI models, and deploying robot capabilities in the real world.
Nvidia says the reference design provides researchers with access to advanced hardware and an open software stack without requiring proprietary robotics platforms.
“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. “The Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence.”
The platform features a Unitree H2 humanoid robot with 31 degrees of freedom, dual Sharpa Wave tactile robot hands with 22 degrees of freedom each, and Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor onboard computing powered by a Blackwell GPU.
A key element of the announcement is Nvidia’s effort to provide a complete humanoid development workflow through the Isaac GR00T ecosystem. The software stack includes Isaac Teleop for data collection, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and training, Isaac ROS middleware for deployment, and Nvidia’s open foundation models for humanoid reasoning and behavior development.
Nvidia also announced that the Isaac GR00T development platform will support the widely used Unitree G1 humanoid robot, extending access to a broader robotics research community.
Several leading research institutions have committed to using the platform, including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and the Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory at the University of California San Diego.
“Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines,” said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center.
“The Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Robot gives our students and collaborators an open humanoid reference design with dexterous hands, onboard AI compute and the Nvidia Isaac GR00T development platform for creating, comparing and sharing robot behaviors on physical hardware.”
Marco Hutter, professor at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab, said: “The Nvidia Isaac GR00T reference design gives our teams a state-of-the-art humanoid platform for collecting data, testing algorithms and validating robot behaviors with the Nvidia Isaac GR00T development platform.”
The Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot is expected to be available from Unitree in late 2026.
