Nvidia Unveils Open-Source Humanoid Robot Reference Design, Targeting Global Universities, with Initial Adoption by Stanford and ETH Zurich

According to Perceiving AI monitoring, Jensen Huang unveiled during GTC Taipei 2026 a humanoid robot reference design based on the Isaac GR00T platform. The solution features the Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot body with Sharpa five-fingered dexterous hands (25 degrees of freedom per hand, 31 degrees of freedom in total, standing 6 feet tall, weighing 150 pounds), running on the Jetson Thor robot computer and integrating the full NVIDIA software stack: Cosmos for world modeling and synthetic data generation, Isaac Lab for simulation training, Isaac Teleop for remote operation and data collection, and Isaac ROS for deployment and runtime.

The goal of this reference design is to enable universities and research institutions to kickstart cutting-edge humanoid robotics research in a matter of hours without starting from scratch. The initial adopters of this design include Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and the University of California, San Diego.