NVIDIA Launches Isaac GR00T, Fuels Humanoid Robotics Trade

NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot on May 31, 2026 at NVIDIA GTC Taipei, per NVIDIA's official press release. NVIDIA describes it as "the first open humanoid robot reference design" built on NVIDIA Jetson Thor and the Isaac GR00T open development platform. The robot is available for order from Unitree in late 2026, with Unitree confirming the platform via a simultaneous PRNewswire press release.

The reference design is a fully specified stack per NVIDIA's press release:

• •Unitree H2 Plus humanoid chassis: nearly 6 feet tall, 150 lbs, 31 degrees of freedom across the body
• •Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands: 22 degrees of freedom, bringing total to 75 degrees of freedom
• •NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard compute: Blackwell GPU with 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS, 14-core Arm CPU, 128 GB unified memory, 40-130W configurable power range
• •Multi-view sensing: head-mounted stereo camera (140 degree horizontal), wrist cameras, inertia measurement unit
• •Whole-body control: arm torque up to 120 Newton-meters, leg torque up to 360 Newton-meters
• •Battery: 15Ah, ~3 hours of operation
• •Connectivity: Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, USB, microphones and speakers

Per NVIDIA's announcement, the Isaac GR00T platform includes Isaac Teleop for demonstration data capture, GR00T open foundation models for humanoid reasoning, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and policy evaluation, Isaac ROS middleware for on-robot inference, and Jetson Thor for real-time control. The modular design allows teams to use all or selected components.

NVIDIA confirmed Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory as launch users. Quotes from Steve Cousins (Stanford), Marco Hutter (ETH Zurich), Deepak Pathak (Skild AI), Dieter Fox (Ai2), and Michael Yip (UC San Diego) are published in the NVIDIA press release praising the open platform approach.

Jensen Huang is directly quoted: "Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world's largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity. The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence."

Industry observers note that standardized reference platforms reduce custom integration friction and accelerate ecosystem adoption. NVIDIA's approach - providing the compute and software layer while partnering with Unitree for the body and Sharpa for end effectors - mirrors patterns from previous reference platform launches where a central compute/software contributor anchors a multi-vendor hardware ecosystem. The Isaac GR00T workflow will also support the Unitree G1, extending the platform to a widely-used existing research robot.

The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot will be available from Unitree in late 2026. The Isaac GR00T reference workflow for the Unitree G1 is expected on GitHub and Hugging Face shortly.