NVIDIA Unveils Isaac GR00T Humanoid Robot for Research

NVIDIA has announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, an open platform designed to accelerate advancements in humanoid robotics research. Revealed at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026, the robot combines advanced hardware, including the NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute, and the open Isaac GR00T development platform. The initiative aims to streamline the robotics development process and make advanced physical AI more accessible to researchers worldwide.

The Isaac GR00T robot integrates a Unitree H2 humanoid chassis, Sharpa Wave five-fingered hands, and a state-of-the-art sensor array, offering 75 degrees of freedom for highly dexterous manipulation. It features onboard NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor compute, with an NVIDIA Blackwell GPU delivering 2,070 FP4 teraflops of AI performance, ensuring robust real-time processing and control.

This marks the latest evolution of NVIDIA’s Project GR00T, first introduced in 2024 as a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. Building on the GR00T N1 foundation model, which was unveiled at GTC 2025, the new reference design incorporates advances from subsequent iterations, including enhanced reasoning capabilities from the Cosmos model family. These upgrades position Isaac GR00T as a cutting-edge platform for developing general-purpose humanoids capable of real-world deployment.

For researchers, the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot simplifies a historically fragmented process that spans hardware integration, simulation, training, and deployment. The open platform allows teams to focus on task-specific innovations rather than rebuilding infrastructure for each experiment. Leading institutions such as Stanford Robotics Center, ETH Zurich, Ai2, and UC San Diego have already committed to using the robot to explore new frontiers in humanoid robotics. According to Jensen Huang, NVIDIA’s CEO, the platform “opens a multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity” by enabling the development of physical AI for large-scale industries.

For investors, this announcement underscores NVIDIA’s strategic focus on robotics and AI as key growth areas. NVIDIA’s stock (NVDA) is currently trading at $211.14, with a market capitalization of $5.15 trillion as of May 30, 2026. The company’s robotics initiatives, including the GR00T platform, align with its broader efforts to dominate the AI hardware and software ecosystem. Recent partnerships with open-source platforms like Hugging Face further enhance accessibility, potentially solidifying NVIDIA’s position as a leader in the robotics research market.

The Isaac GR00T robot will be available through Unitree in late 2026, with additional development tools expected on GitHub and Hugging Face soon. This rollout builds on NVIDIA’s existing roadmap for open robotics, following the release of the GR00T N1.7 model earlier this year, which was tailored for real-world humanoid deployment.

As demand for humanoid robots accelerates across industries ranging from healthcare to logistics, NVIDIA’s open approach could help foster a more collaborative robotics ecosystem. With its hardware and software stack at the core, the Isaac GR00T platform represents a significant step toward making general-purpose humanoids a commercial reality.

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