NVIDIA builds the world’s first open humanoid robot foundation model

NVIDIA has announced a portfolio of technologies to supercharge humanoid robot development, including NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1. Isaac GR00T N1 is the world’s first open, fully customizable foundation model for generalized humanoid reasoning and skills. The other technologies include simulation frameworks and blueprints such as the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for generating synthetic data, as well as Newton, an open-source physics engine under development with Google DeepMind and Disney Research and purpose-built for developing robots.

“The age of generalist robotics is here,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “With NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 and new data-generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere will open the next frontier in the age of AI.”

GR00T N1 complements humanoid developer community

The GR00T N1 foundation model features a dual-system architecture, inspired by principles of human cognition. “System 1” is a fast-thinking action model, mirroring human reflexes or intuition. “System 2” is a slow-thinking model for deliberate, methodical decision-making.

Powered by a vision language model, System 2 reasons about its environment and the instructions it has received to plan actions. System 1 then translates these plans into precise, continuous robot movements. System 1 is trained on human demonstration data and a massive amount of synthetic data generated by the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

GR00T N1 can easily generalize across common tasks — such as grasping, moving objects with one or both arms, and transferring items from one arm to another — or perform multistep tasks that require long context and combinations of general skills. These capabilities can be applied across use cases such as material handling, packaging and inspection.

NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Disney Research Focus on Physics

NVIDIA also nnounced a collaboration with Google DeepMind and Disney Research to develop Newton, an open-source physics engine that lets robots learn how to handle complex tasks with greater precision.

Built on the NVIDIA Warp framework, Newton will be optimized for robot learning and compatible with simulation frameworks such as Google DeepMind’s MuJoCo and NVIDIA Isaac Lab. Additionally, the three companies plan to enable Newton to use Disney’s physics engine.

Google DeepMind and NVIDIA are collaborating to develop MuJoCo-Warp, which is expected to accelerate robotics machine learning workloads by more than 70x and will be available to developers through Google DeepMind’s MJX open-source library, as well as through Newton.

Disney Research will be one of the first to use Newton to advance its robotic character platform that powers next-generation entertainment robots, such as the expressive Star Wars-inspired BDX droids that joined Huang on stage during his GTC keynote.