Nvidia unveils open humanoid robot platform for researchers at GTC Taipei

Nvidia Unveils Isaac GR00T Humanoid Robot at GTC Taipei

Nvidia on Sunday launched its first open humanoid robot reference design at GTC Taipei, packaging a full-scale robot body, dexterous hands, and its AI software stack into a single platform aimed at academic researchers working on physical intelligence.

An Open Platform for Humanoid Research

The Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot combines a Unitree H2 Plus chassis — standing nearly six feet tall and weighing 150 pounds with 31 degrees of freedom — with dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands that add another 44 degrees of freedom for dexterous manipulation. Onboard computing comes from Nvidia’s Jetson AGX Thor T5000, which features a Blackwell GPU delivering 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance and 128GB of unified memory.globenewswire

“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO, said during the keynote. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence.”barchart

The software side spans Nvidia’s full Isaac GR00T stack: Isaac Teleop for capturing demonstration data, Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab for simulation and training, Isaac ROS middleware for deployment, and GR00T open foundation models for humanoid reasoning and multitask behavior.barchart

Academic Institutions Line Up

Stanford Robotics Center, ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab, the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory have committed to adopting the platform.globenewswire

“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. Dieter Fox, senior research director at Ai2, described the reference robot as providing “the hardware and software components necessary to continue our work in broadly competent robotics.”barchart

Availability and Expansion

The reference robot will be available from Unitree in late 2026, and Nvidia said its Isaac GR00T reference workflow will also support the smaller Unitree G1, with tools expected soon on GitHub and Hugging Face. GTC Taipei, running June 1–4, serves as Nvidia’s latest venue for showcasing its expanding robotics ecosystem alongside its AI infrastructure platforms.nvidia