NVIDIA Releases Open Humanoid Robot Reference Design for Global Universities, First Adopters Include

According to Beating Monitoring, Jensen Huang announced the open humanoid robot reference design based on the Isaac GR00T platform during his speech at GTC Taipei 2026. This solution utilizes the Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot body paired with the Sharpa dexterous hand (with 25 degrees of freedom per hand, 31 degrees of freedom in total, standing 6 feet tall and weighing 150 pounds), running on the Jetson Thor robotic computer. It integrates NVIDIA's complete software stack: Cosmos for generating synthetic data with world models, Isaac Lab for simulation training, Isaac Teleop for remote control data collection, and Isaac ROS for deployment runtime. The goal of this reference design is to enable universities and research institutions to start cutting-edge humanoid robotics research within hours, without needing to build from scratch. The first adopters include Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford Robotics Center, and the University of California, San Diego.