NVIDIA used its COMPUTEX Taipei keynote on the night of May 31, 2026 to unveil the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, the first open reference design for full-stack humanoid research. The system bundles a Unitree H2 Plus chassis, Sharpa Wave five-fingered tactile hands, NVIDIA Jetson Thor onboard compute and the open Isaac GR00T model and simulation stack, and is targeted at academic labs that today are locked out of frontier humanoid work by proprietary hardware.
What is in the reference design
The chassis is Unitree's new H2 Plus: a 6-foot, 150-pound bipedal humanoid with 31 degrees of freedom across the body. Sharpa's Wave hands add another 22 DoF apiece, bringing the platform to 75 degrees of freedom across body and hands — enough dexterity for two-handed, contact-rich manipulation tasks that have been the limiting factor for academic robot benchmarks.
Onboard compute is the Jetson Thor module NVIDIA made generally available earlier this month: a Blackwell-class system-on-module rated at up to 2,070 FP4 teraflops in a 130-watt envelope, with 128 GB of memory. The software side ships with the Isaac GR00T N1.7 open VLA reasoning model and Isaac Sim training pipelines, both available on Hugging Face and GitHub.
Why a reference platform
The race to build foundation models for humanoids has, until now, been a closed-loop game between well-funded startups: Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, 1X and Figure all train on proprietary hardware. NVIDIA's pitch is that universities cannot meaningfully contribute to that frontier without comparable embodiments. A standardised, openly documented platform with the same simulation, runtime and policy interfaces should make benchmarks reproducible and lower the cost of moving research demos onto real hardware.
Early academic partners
Confirmed launch users include the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), ETH Zurich, Stanford's Robotics Center and UC San Diego's Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. NVIDIA says workflows for the smaller Unitree G1 will also be released so groups without H2 Plus access can stay on the same software stack.
Availability and price
Unitree will sell the H2 Plus version of the reference robot in late 2026; pricing has not been disclosed but is expected to undercut Western humanoid hardware by a wide margin given Unitree's existing G1 and B2 cost structure. The Jetson Thor developer kit is already shipping at $3,499, with T5000 production modules from $2,999 in volumes of 1,000.
Industry implications
The release pushes humanoid research toward the same kind of open, comparable platforms that PyTorch and ImageNet did for vision and language. It also tightens NVIDIA's grip on the physical AI stack at a moment when competing robot foundation-model labs are racing to define the API surface for embodied AI.
Reporting based on coverage from NVIDIA Newsroom, PR Newswire (Unitree) and TechCrunch.