NVIDIA Unveils Open Isaac GR00T Humanoid Reference for Academic Research

NVIDIA announces the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, an open, end-to-end platform that combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid body with Sharpa five-finger hands, NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute, and the Isaac GR00T software stack to streamline data capture, simulation, training and deployment. Leading institutions such as Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego will use the reference design to accelerate frontier humanoid robotics research. Availability is planned from Unitree in late 2026, with the Isaac GR00T workflow for Unitree G1 and related open models on GitHub and Hugging Face for developers.