NVIDIA GTC 2026 robotics: GR00T N2 world action model previewed, Cosmos 3 and GR00T N1.7 announced
At GTC on 2026-03-16 NVIDIA previewed Isaac GR00T N2, a "world action model" based on DreamZero research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments over twice as often as leading VLAs (due by end of 2026), announced Cosmos 3 as a single model unifying world generation, reasoning and action simulation, and put GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access.
Key facts
- GR00T N2: DreamZero-based world action model; predicts future world states before acting; >2x success on new tasks/environments vs leading VLAs; No. 1 on MolmoSpaces and RoboArena (NVIDIA); availability end of 2026
- GR00T N1.7: 3B open reasoning VLA, early access with commercial licensing at GTC; open weights on Hugging Face with blog 2026-04-17
- GR00T N1.7 pretrained on 20,854 hours of human egocentric video; NVIDIA claims the first scaling law for robot dexterity
- Cosmos 3: 'first world foundation model unifying synthetic world generation, vision reasoning and action simulation' (weights released ~2026-06-01)
- Isaac Lab 3.0 early access with Newton physics engine 1.0
- Isaac Lab 3.0 timeline (GitHub): beta 2026-03-17 (on Isaac Sim 6.0), beta 2 2026-06-17, Early Access 2026-09-16; GA targeted for end of October 2026
- Newton: open-source GPU physics engine on NVIDIA Warp/OpenUSD, co-developed by NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Disney Research under the Linux Foundation; v1.0.0 tagged on GitHub 2026-04-13; solvers include MuJoCo Warp and Kamino plus VBD for deformables
- Healthcare robotics: Open-H-Embodiment (first large open medical-robotics dataset, ~778 h real+synthetic from 35 organizations), GR00T-H (GR00T VLA with a Cosmos-Reason 2 2B backbone post-trained for surgery on ~600 h; called 'the first policy model for surgical robotics tasks'; completes an end-to-end suture on the SutureBot benchmark) and Cosmos-H surgical simulator; a GR00T-H-N1.7 variant followed on HF 2026-05-30
- Same-day open-model release also covered Nemotron 3 Ultra/Omni/VoiceChat, Alpamayo 1.5 (reasoning VLA for autonomous vehicles), Proteina-Complexa (protein binder design) and nvQSP
- Partners: FANUC, ABB, YASKAWA, KUKA (2M+ installed robots), plus Boston Dynamics, Figure, Agility, 1X
What happened
The robotics part of Jensen Huang's GTC 2026 keynote. GR00T N2 moves NVIDIA's humanoid model from a VLA to a world model that "imagines" outcomes before acting. GR00T N1.7 swaps in a Cosmos-Reason2-2B backbone and adds human-video pretraining.
Why it matters
NVIDIA is pitching world-model-based policies and human video as a way to trade scarce robot teleoperation data for compute. The N1.7 weights are one of the main open alternatives to closed models from Physical Intelligence, Google and Figure. As of 2026-09-29, N2 had not been released.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
- 2026-09-29: added healthcare robotics (Open-H, GR00T-H, GR00T-H-N1.7) and the companion 'Expands Open Model Families' release; added Isaac Lab 3.0 / Newton 1.0 release timeline
Models
- Isaac GR00T N1.7 NVIDIA · current
- Isaac GR00T N2 NVIDIA · preview
Related events
- NVIDIA GTC 2026: Vera Rubin platform, Groq 3 LPX, Feynman preview and $1T demand outlook ★★★★
- NVIDIA releases Cosmos 3, an open omni-model for physical AI (world generation, reasoning and actions) ★★★
- Ai2 launches MolmoSpaces, an open simulation ecosystem and leaderboard for generalist robot policies ★★
- Ai2 releases MolmoAct 2, a fully open robot action-reasoning model that beats π0.5 on real-world tasks ★★
- NVIDIA unveils Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid, an open humanoid research platform built with Unitree and Sharpa ★★
Sources (10)
- officialNVIDIA Newsroom: NVIDIA and Global Robotics Leaders Take Physical AI to the Real World
- officialNVIDIA Newsroom: NVIDIA Expands Open Model Families (agentic, physical, healthcare AI)
- officialHugging Face blog: The first healthcare robotics dataset and foundational physical AI models (Open-H, GR00T-H, Cosmos-H)
- codeHugging Face: nvidia/GR00T-H-N1.7
- codeIsaac Lab releases (GitHub)
- codeNewton physics engine (GitHub)
- officialHugging Face blog: Isaac GR00T N1.7
- codeIsaac-GR00T GitHub
- pressThe Decoder: Nvidia wants to swap robotics' data problem for a compute problem
- pressTrendForce: NVIDIA expands robotics ecosystem at GTC
id: 2026-03-16-nvidia-gtc-2026-robotics-groot-n2-cosmos-3 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline