NVIDIA announced the Isaac Gr00t reference design humanoid robot platform during Jensen Huang’s keynote at Computex. The platform integrates a nearly 6-foot tall Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot, Sharpa five-fingered hands, and NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor onboard compute, aimed at facilitating humanoid development workflows for researchers and developers through open software and models.
The Unitree H2 humanoid chassis, which weighs 150 pounds, features 31 degrees of freedom. Priced at $29,900, the model is currently available for exploration only through renders on Unitree’s website. The Isaac Gr00t platform is set to support the more affordable Unitree G1 humanoid robot as well.
In March 2023, NVIDIA introduced its Gr00t N1 foundational model. The Isaac Gr00t humanoid robot includes dual Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands with 22 degrees of freedom and multi-view sensing capabilities, featuring a head-mounted stereo camera, wrist cameras, and inertial measurement. The robot provides whole-body control with arm torque of up to 120 Newton-meters (88 foot pounds).
The platform is powered by the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 onboard compute, which incorporates an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU and 128GB of unified memory. The compute unit has a configurable power range of 40 to 130 watts, and the platform utilizes a 15Ah battery, offering just under 1 kWh of capacity for approximately three hours of operation.
No physical robot was present at the announcement; Huang emphasized that Isaac Gr00t serves as an open foundation for humanoid development. Multiple institutions, including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego, will utilize the reference design. Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center, stated, “Robotics moves fastest when researchers can build on open platforms, share code and test ideas on real machines.”
