NVIDIA has announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot at GTC Taipei, the first open humanoid robot reference design built on the company’s Jetson Thor compute platform and Isaac GR00T open software stack. The system combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid chassis, Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, and NVIDIA’s full physical AI development environment into a single integrated platform for frontier robotics research. It will be available from Unitree in late 2026.
Leading research institutions including Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory will use the reference design to advance humanoid robotics research. NVIDIA Research will also use the platform to develop its Isaac GR00T open models and frameworks.
Hardware Specifications
The Unitree H2 Plus chassis stands nearly six feet tall, weighs 150 pounds, and has 31 degrees of freedom across the body. The dual Sharpa Wave hands add 22 degrees of freedom each, bringing the full-body total to 75 degrees of freedom. The hands feature tactile sensing for dexterous manipulation.
Sensing is handled by a head-mounted stereo camera with a 140-degree horizontal field of view, wrist cameras for close-range manipulation, and an inertia measurement unit for motion tracking. Arm torque reaches up to 120 Newton-meters, leg torque up to 360 Newton-meters, with a rated arm payload of 7 kilograms and a peak payload of 15 kilograms. Battery capacity is 15Ah providing approximately three hours of operation.
Onboard compute is provided by the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 module, featuring a Blackwell GPU delivering 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, a 14-core Arm CPU, 128GB of unified memory, and a configurable 40 to 130-watt power range. Connectivity includes Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.2, USB, and integrated microphones and speakers for voice interaction.
The Software Stack
The Isaac GR00T platform covers the full humanoid development pipeline. Isaac Teleop handles high-quality demonstration data capture for training. Isaac GR00T open foundation models support humanoid reasoning, learning, and multitask behavior. Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab provide simulation environments for training and policy evaluation before physical deployment. Isaac ROS middleware transfers trained policies onto the robot. Jetson Thor handles real-time on-robot inference and control.
The platform is modular: research teams can use the full stack or integrate selected components into existing pipelines. Researchers retain control of their robot data, training data, telemetry, and logs – a design choice that addresses data sovereignty concerns that have limited adoption of proprietary platforms.
The Isaac GR00T reference workflow will also support the Unitree G1, extending the same development approach to a robot widely used across research institutions. That workflow is expected to be available on GitHub and Hugging Face soon.
Why an Open Reference Design
The announcement addresses a structural problem in humanoid robotics research: fragmentation. Research teams currently navigate hardware integration, data collection, simulation, training, evaluation, and deployment across incompatible tools and platforms, rebuilding the same infrastructure for each robot or task.
“The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Robot gives our students and collaborators an open humanoid reference design with dexterous hands, onboard AI compute and the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T development platform for creating, comparing and sharing robot behaviors on physical hardware,” said Steve Cousins, executive director of the Stanford Robotics Center.
“To make progress toward general-purpose robots, researchers need platforms that are both capable and broadly accessible,” said Deepak Pathak, CEO of Skild AI. “A reference design lets more researchers participate in frontier humanoid research and move from ideas to experiments faster.”
“Humanoid robots will bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries, opening a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence.”
