NVIDIA and Unitree reveal humanoid robot design

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang on Monday announced a strategic partnership with China's Unitree Robotics to launch the Isaac GR00T reference humanoid robot, an integrated platform designed to accelerate global humanoid robotics research and development, CGTN reports.

photo: QAZINFORM

Targeting leading research institutions such as Stanford University and ETH Zurich, the system combines Unitree's H2 robot body, Singapore-based Sharpa's five-finger dexterous hands and NVIDIA's full-stack AI infrastructure.

The H2 platform stands approximately 1.8 meters tall and weighs 68 kilograms – dimensions Huang joked were "similar to my own." The robot features 31 degrees of freedom (DOF), complemented by Sharpa's hands offering 25 DOF each for advanced manipulation.

At the core of the system is the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000, built on the Blackwell GPU architecture. Delivering up to 2,070 FP4 trillion operations per second with 128GB of memory, the platform serves as the robot's "brain," running the Isaac GR00T foundation model​ to provide advanced reasoning and decision-making capabilities.

Unveiled during Huang's keynote, the reference design integrates Sharpa's tactile technology, Unitree's hardware and NVIDIA's edge computing into a single, validated configuration. This move underscores NVIDIA's strategy to establish a foundational ecosystem for physical AI, lowering the barrier for developers to train and deploy intelligent humanoid applications.

Earlier, it was reported that NVIDIA had introduced RTX Spark, a new computer chip designed to bring advanced AI capabilities directly to personal computers, marking what the company describes as a major shift in how users interact with their devices.