Breaking

NVIDIA Unveils Open Humanoid Reference Design Built on GR00T

June 22, 2026 at 11:26 EDT

Robotics
AI Agents
Infra & Chips

On May 31, 2026, at GTC Taipei, NVIDIA introduced its first open humanoid robot reference design, the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot. The full-stack package integrates hardware, onboard compute, software and models, unifying data collection, simulation, training, evaluation and real-world deployment, and is offered to academic research institutions. Official announcement

Late 2026 · NVIDIA Isaac GR00T

The World's First Open Humanoid Reference Design

NVIDIA unveils a full hardware-and-software blueprint for humanoid robots — Unitree chassis, tactile hands and Jetson AGX Thor compute — built to let researchers advance physical AI without proprietary platforms.

degrees of freedom
(body 31 + hands 22)

2,070

FP4 teraflops AI compute
(Jetson AGX Thor T5000)

128GB

unified memory
on Blackwell GPU

~3h

operation per charge
(0.972 kWh battery)

Payload — Rated vs Peak

Arm lift capacity, in kilograms

7 kg

Rated

15 kg

Peak

Stands ~183 cm tall · weighs ~68 kg · Unitree H2 chassis + Sharpa Wave tactile five-fingered hands

The Isaac GR00T Software Stack

An end-to-end open workflow from data to deployment

Isaac Teleop

Capture demonstration data

→

Sim & Lab

Train & evaluate

→

GR00T Models

Reasoning & multitask

→

ROS Deploy

Accelerated middleware

Researcher Reception

An open platform lets researchers share code and test ideas freely — praised as well suited to real-world validation and a "blueprint" lowering entry barriers for startups. Early adopters: Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego.

Open Questions

Shipping is slated for late 2026, so no large-scale deployments exist yet — for now it remains a research platform. Safety and real-world robustness are the focus going forward; pricing is customized and undisclosed.

NVIDIA builds no robots — it aims to own the ecosystem through compute and software.

A Chinese Unitree chassis improves researcher accessibility, while Halos for Robotics adds a physical-AI safety layer — first adopted by Agility Robotics for humanoids bound for Amazon and Toyota operations. Rivals include Tesla Optimus, Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility, 1X and NEURA.

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