SAN JOSE, CA (GTC), Mar 21, 2025 – NVIDIA has introduced a suite of technologies designed to accelerate the development of humanoid robots. Leading this lineup is NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, the world’s first customizable foundation model built for general humanoid problem-solving and skills.
The other technologies include simulation tools and frameworks such as the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint, which enables the creation of synthetic data. Additionally, NVIDIA is collaborating with Google DeepMind and Disney Research to develop Newton, an open-source physics engine tailored for building robots.
GR00T N1 is the first in a series of adaptable models NVIDIA plans to release for global robotics developers. The models aim to address pressing labor shortages, with industries worldwide facing a gap of over 50 million workers.
“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 Advances 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 the plans into exact, 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 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. The capabilities can be applied across use cases such as material handling, packaging and inspection.
Developers and researchers can post-train GR00T N1 with real or synthetic data for their specific humanoid robot or task.
In his GTC keynote, Huang demonstrated 1X’s humanoid robot autonomously performing domestic tidying tasks using a post-trained policy built on GR00T N1. The robot’s autonomous capabilities are the result of an AI training collaboration between 1X and NVIDIA.
“The future of humanoids is about adaptability and learning,” said Bernt Børnich, CEO of 1X Technologies. “While we develop our own models, NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 provides a significant boost to robot reasoning and skills. With minimal post-training data, we fully deployed on NEO Gamma – advancing our mission of creating robots that are not just tools, but companions capable of assisting humans in meaningful, immeasurable ways.”
Among the additional leading humanoid developers worldwide with early access to GR00T N1 are Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and NEURA Robotics.
NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Disney Research Focus on Physics
NVIDIA announced 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.
“The BDX droids are just the beginning. We’re committed to bringing more characters to life in ways the world hasn’t seen before, and this collaboration with Disney Research, NVIDIA and Google DeepMind is a key part of that vision,” said Kyle Laughlin, senior vice president at Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. “This collaboration will allow us to create a new generation of robotic characters that are more expressive and engaging than ever before — and connect with our guests in ways that only Disney can.”
NVIDIA and Disney Research, along with Intrinsic, announced an additional collaboration to build OpenUSD pipelines and best practices for robotics data workflows.
More Data to Advance Robotics Post-Training
Large, diverse, high-quality datasets are essential for robot development but can be expensive to collect. For humanoids, real-world human demonstration data is limited by time constraints.
Announced today, the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic manipulation motion generation helps address this challenge. Built on Omniverse and NVIDIA Cosmos Transfer world foundation models, the blueprint helps developers create a large amount of simulated motion data for tasks using just a few human demonstrations.
Using the first components available for the blueprint, NVIDIA generated 780,000 synthetic trajectories – the equivalent of 6,500 hours, or nine continuous months, of human demonstration data – in just 11 hours. Then, combining the synthetic data with real data, NVIDIA improved GR00T N1’s performance by 40%, compared with using only real data.
To further equip the developer community with valuable training data, NVIDIA is releasing the GR00T N1 dataset as part of a larger open-source physical AI dataset — also announced at GTC and presently available on Hugging Face.
Availability
NVIDIA GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios are available for download purpose from Hugging Face and GitHub.
The NVIDIA DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer, provides developers a turnkey system to expand GR00T N1’s capabilities for new robots, tasks and environments without extensive custom programming.
The Newton physics engine is expected to be available later this year.
Source: NVIDIA
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corp. is an American tech company headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. Renowned for designing and manufacturing graphics processing units (GPUs), NVIDIA’s innovations have significantly impacted various sectors. The company’s products and services cater to industries such as gaming, where its GPUs enhance visual experiences; artificial intelligence (AI), providing high-performance computing solutions; automotive, contributing to autonomous vehicle technologies; and robotics, offering advanced AI perception and simulation tools. Over its more than three decades in business, NVIDIA has experienced substantial growth. In the fiscal quarter ending January 2025, the company reported record revenue of $39.3 billion and a net income of $22.1 billion. NVIDIA’s headquarters, designed to facilitate a flat organizational structure, emphasizes information flow and harmony between leadership and employees.