Nvidia announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot , the company's first open humanoid robot reference design, built on its Jetson Thor hardware and GR00T software platform and aimed at academic researchers.
At the hardware level, a Unitree H2 Plus chassis forms the robot's body — measuring close to six feet in height at 150 pounds — paired with dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands and onboard Nvidia compute, all tied together by an open software stack covering data capture, simulation, training, and deployment, the company said. Nvidia chose Chinese robotics maker Unitree as its hardware partner for the platform, according to CNBC .
Across the full system, the humanoid achieves a combined 75 degrees of freedom — 31 from the robot body and 22 from each of the two Sharpa hands. Powering the platform is the Jetson AGX Thor T5000 module, which integrates a Blackwell GPU rated at 2,070 FP4 teraflops, a 14-core Arm processor, and 128GB of unified memory. The company said the onboard 15Ah battery pack supports approximately three hours of continuous use.
The GR00T software stack includes tools for teleoperation and demonstration data capture, open foundation models for reasoning and multitask behavior, simulation and training environments via Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, and middleware for deploying trained policies onto the physical robot. Researchers retain control of their own data, training sets, and telemetry, Nvidia said.
Research institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory have committed to using the platform.
"We built this for higher education and university researchers, because for them to build this is insanely hard to do," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Monday in a keynote speech in Taipei.
Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia's vice president of physical AI simulation, described the platform as "taking frontier humanoid research out of the hands of only the world's largest tech companies and AI unicorns, and putting it in reach of every lab," according to CNBC.
The GR00T developer platform will also support the Unitree G1 humanoid robot, with a reference workflow expected soon on GitHub and Hugging Face, Nvidia said. The H2 Plus will be available from Unitree in late 2026.
