In his keynote speech on the GTC 2025 convention, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang introduced an enormous leap within the growth of humanoid robots: the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.
The N1 mannequin is the inaugural basis mannequin launched inside NVIDIA’s GR00T general-purpose robotic growth platform. It is usually the “world’s first open mannequin” for humanoid robotics.
NVIDIA GR00T N1 mannequin structure
It’s a totally customizable mannequin that makes use of a dual-system structure impressed by human cognitive processing. The primary system is a “fast-thinking motion mannequin” that allows exact and steady robotic actions, and the second is a “slow-thinking” planning mannequin that helps the robotic make deliberate choices about its setting and directions. Each techniques are built-in tightly, and adjustments made to the mannequin are utilized holistically.
In his announcement, Huang acknowledged, “By the top of this decade, the world goes to be at the very least 50 million employees brief,” earlier than emphasizing the necessity for humanoid robots to fill the labor hole.
NVIDIA had earlier introduced Challenge GR00T, a sophisticated growth platform for next-generation humanoid robotics constructed on the foundational robotic studying framework, Isaac Lab. Alongside pre-trained basis fashions for robotic “cognition and management,” GR00T gives simulation-ready 3D belongings, simulation frameworks, and artificial information blueprints, all operating on the purpose-built Jetson AGX Thor.
GR00T makes it simpler and cheaper to coach humanoid robots by leveraging human demonstration information, artificial information, and optimized workflows constructed on the NVIDIA Omniverse and Cosmos platforms.
NVIDIA Omniverse is a “digital twin working system” that gives builders with the constructing blocks for creating “bodily correct world-scale simulations” for functions comparable to robotics, autonomous automobiles, and imaginative and prescient AI. Cosmos is a “world basis mannequin growth platform” for creating fashions able to understanding and producing life like representations of the actual world. In easier phrases, Omniverse emphasizes bodily accuracy and Cosmos focuses on photorealism.
Actual-world sensor and/or demonstration information is aggregated in Omniverse to generate rendered picture or video outputs, that are then used alongside textual content prompts to situation Cosmos. This allows Cosmos to create a nearly infinite variety of managed, photoreal, and numerous artificial information for bodily AI coaching.
NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint structure
The GR00T N1 mannequin was educated on an “expansive humanoid dataset,” combining robotic information obtained through teleoperation, artificial information created utilizing the GR00T Blueprint, and human movies from the Web. NVIDIA says the combination of actual and artificial information “resulted in a 40% efficiency enhance for GR00T N1 in comparison with utilizing solely actual information.”
N1 could be fine-tuned for particular embodiments, duties, and environments utilizing a customized dataset. As a part of the keynote, Jensen showcased an autonomy demo that includes 1X Applied sciences’ humanoid robotic, NEO, loading a dishwasher with a post-trained coverage constructed on GR00T N1. 1X CEO Bernt Børnich stated, “Whereas we develop our personal fashions, NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 supplies a big enhance to robotic reasoning and expertise.”
The GR00T N1 mannequin has additionally been built-in into the Fourier GR-1 humanoid robotic, which executes a collaborative multi-step sequence — greedy, transferring, and passing — within the NVIDIA GTC demo. The GR00T Blueprint, made up of particular workflows operated throughout the open-source Isaac Lab framework, has been tailored by humanoid builders comparable to Agibot, Mentee Robotics, UCR, and X-Humanoid.
The GR00T platform is predicted to learn different main robotics firms like UNITREE, Determine AI, NEURA Robotics, Galbot, Agility Robotics, Sanctuary AI, Boston Dynamics, and Apptronik, amongst others. A few of these firms have acknowledged that they’re engaged on incorporating the GR00T N1 mannequin into their current humanoid robots.
Though N1’s core focus is humanoids, Workforce Firebreathing Rubber Duckies fine-tuned the mannequin to run on two LeRobot SO-100 robotic arms for a bimanual pick-and-place process. The undertaking gained first place within the Embodied AI Hackathon.
Huang declared that the “age of generalist robots is right here,” however the use instances for humanoid robots are nonetheless pretty restricted and simply replaceable by specialist robots. Generalist robots might develop into widespread and drive a booming business, however solely as soon as they surpass specialist robots in usefulness.
NVIDIA is, nevertheless, bullish on the robotics market, and GR00T N1 is simply the primary in a collection of customizable fashions that the corporate will “pretrain and launch to worldwide robotics builders.”
The GR00T N1 mannequin could be downloaded from Hugging Face, together with a subset of the coaching information. The Isaac-GR00T GitHub repository supplies pattern datasets and PyTorch scripts for fine-tuning. The GR00T Blueprint for artificial movement era is on the market on GitHub and as an interactive demo on construct.nvidia.com.
