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NVIDIA Validates Open Humanoid Reference Robot With Unitree Chassis and Sharpa Hands

The design is meant to accelerate university robotics work by combining Jetson Thor compute, Isaac GR00T models, tactile hands, and chip-level security into a single research platform.

Overview

  • NVIDIA on Monday, June 1, 2026, unveiled and validated the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid that pairs Unitree’s H2 Plus body with Sharpa’s Wave five-finger hands and NVIDIA’s Jetson AGX Thor compute for an integrated research platform.
  • The system is built for dexterous manipulation and real-time control with 75 total degrees of freedom, Sharpa hands offering 22 degrees each and high-resolution fingertip tactile arrays, plus onboard sensors for vision and motion.
  • Onboard compute centers on Jetson Thor with NVIDIA Blackwell GPU performance quoted at about 2,070 FP4 teraflops, a 14-core Arm CPU and 128 GB of unified memory to run Isaac GR00T models and low-latency policies on the robot itself.
  • NVIDIA will host Isaac GR00T models on Hugging Face under the OpenMDW-1.1 license and offers Isaac Sim and Teleop workflows to shorten sim-to-real cycles for universities such as Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego.
  • Availability timing is unclear with some remarks pointing to October and others saying late 2026, and the choice of Unitree raises geopolitical questions because the company is pursuing a China IPO while some U.S. lawmakers have proposed limits on use by federally funded researchers.