NVIDIA unveils Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid, an open humanoid research platform built with Unitree and Sharpa
On 2026-05-31 NVIDIA announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid, an open reference design for academic research: a Unitree H2 Plus body (31 DoF) with two 22-DoF Sharpa Wave tactile hands and Jetson AGX Thor T5000 compute, preloaded with the GR00T/Isaac software stack. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; AI2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center and UC San Diego are early adopters.
Key facts
- Body: Unitree H2 Plus, nearly 6 ft, ~150 lb, 31 DoF; two Sharpa Wave hands with 22 DoF each (75 DoF total)
- Compute: NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 (Blackwell GPU), 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS, 128 GB unified memory
- Arm torque 120 N·m, leg torque 360 N·m; 7 kg rated / 15 kg peak payload; 15 Ah battery, ~3 h runtime; stereo and wrist cameras
- Software: Isaac GR00T open models, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Isaac ROS; a Unitree G1 reference workflow is also supported
- Availability: from Unitree in late 2026; price not disclosed
- Early research users: AI2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, UC San Diego ARCLab
What happened
NVIDIA packaged a standard humanoid, with a body, dexterous hands, onboard compute and software, so that university labs can run and compare GR00T-style policies on the same hardware. Jensen Huang: "Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world's largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity."
Why it matters
A common hardware target for academic humanoid research is similar to what the Franka arm and DROID did for manipulation. It also further ties the open research ecosystem to NVIDIA's Thor chips and Isaac software.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- NVIDIA GTC 2026 robotics: GR00T N2 world action model previewed, Cosmos 3 and GR00T N1.7 announced ★★★
- NVIDIA releases Cosmos 3, an open omni-model for physical AI (world generation, reasoning and actions) ★★★
Sources (1)
id: 2026-05-31-nvidia-groot-reference-humanoid · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline