For years, building a humanoid robot research platform meant months of painful integration work: sourcing hardware, writing drivers, stitching together simulation tools, and assembling data pipelines before a single experiment could run. NVIDIA and Unitree just announced they want to end that. At GTC Taipei, Jensen Huang unveiled the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, the first open humanoid robot reference design built on NVIDIA's Jetson Thor compute and the Isaac GR00T open development platform, with Unitree's H2 Plus as the physical body.
One Box, Full Stack
The reference design unifies development by bringing a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot and Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands (the "body"), with NVIDIA Jetson Thor-powered onboard compute and Isaac GR00T software and workflows (the "brain") into a single integrated reference design, helping research teams move faster from robot bring-up to skill development and real-world validation. Think of it less as a product launch and more as an infrastructure decision for the research community.
The reference design helps democratize frontier humanoid robotics research by providing access to advanced hardware and an open software stack without requiring proprietary platforms. As demand for general-purpose humanoids accelerates, developers still face a fragmented process spanning hardware integration, data collection, simulation, training, evaluation and deployment. Teams typically spend months cobbling together hardware, software stacks, and data pipelines before getting to actual research. The H2 Plus is designed to skip all of that.
What You Actually Get
The hardware specs are serious. The H2 Plus stands nearly 6 feet tall and weighs 150 pounds, with 31 degrees of freedom across the body. Add the optional Sharpa Wave hands and you get 75 total degrees of freedom. Here is what is packed inside:
- Compute: NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000 with a Blackwell GPU delivering 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS, a 14-core Arm CPU, and 128GB of unified memory
- Torque: Up to 120 N·m arm torque and 360 N·m leg torque, with a rated arm payload of 7 kg and peak payload of 15 kg
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