NVIDIA’s Isaac Gr00t Platform Gives Researchers Access To Frontier Humanoid Robotics

As part of his AI-palooza Computex keynote, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang dove into the most relatable form of artificial intelligence: robots. The company announced the new Isaac Gr00t reference design humanoid robot platform that combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa five-fingered hands and NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute. That’s tied together with NVIDIA’s Gr00t open software and models designed to help “researchers and developers accelerate humanoid development workflows.” 

The platform uses a nearly 6-foot tall Unitree H2 humanoid chassis that weighs 150 pounds, with 31 degrees of freedom across the body. (The H2 model is listed on Unitree’s website for $29,900, though the company has only shown renders on its website). The Gr00t developer platform will also support the cheaper Unitree G1 humaoid robot. NVIDIA first revealed its Gr00t N1 foundational model in March. 

The chassis is married to dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands with 22 degrees of freedom, multi-view sensing including a head-mounted stereo camera, wrist cameras and inertia measurement, along with whole-body control with arm torque of up to 120 Newton-meters (88 foot pounds). 

 Gr00t Isaac is powered by NVIDIA’s Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard compute with an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU, 128GB of unified memory and a configurable 40 to 130 watt power range . The 15Ah battery provides just under 1 kWh of capacity for about three hours of endurance.  

As has been a theme with humanoid presentations, there was no physical robot to be seen. Rather, Huang touted Isaac Gr00t as an open foundation humanoid development platform. The company said that multiple institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego will use the reference design. “Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines,” said Stanford Robotics Center’s executive director Steve Cousins in a statement.