Inside NVIDIA’s Isaac GR00T reference humanoid

Michael Cruz · Published 2026-10-26 · Event 2026-06-01

NVIDIA announced its Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot on June 1, 2026. The design brings together a Unitree H2 Plus body, two Sharpa Wave hands and Jetson Thor computing hardware. It gives research teams an integrated starting point for developing movement and manipulation skills.

The hands add 44 degrees of freedom to the body’s 31, for 75 in total. NVIDIA specifies 128 GB of unified memory and a battery rated for about three hours. These figures describe the reference configuration; they are not measurements from our own testing.

The announcement targets academic research and forecasts availability through Unitree in late 2026. GR00T also names NVIDIA’s broader software platform, so a robot using GR00T models is not necessarily this reference robot.