Humanoid Robots

Accelerate the development of advanced AI robotics.

Apptronik

Workloads

Simulation / Modeling / Design
Robotics

Industries

Manufacturing
Automotive / Transportation
Healthcare and Life Sciences
Retail/ Consumer Packaged Goods

Business Goal

Innovation
Return on Investment

Products

NVIDIA Isaac Lab
NVIDIA OSMO
NVIDIA Isaac GROOT
NVIDIA Jetson Thor

The Next Era of Physical AI

General-purpose humanoid robots are built to quickly adapt to existing human-centric urban and industrial work spaces, helping to tackle tedious, repetitive, or physically demanding tasks. 

These robots are finding their way from factory floors to healthcare facilities, where they’re assisting humans and helping alleviate labor shortages with automation.

Figure

However, building humanoid robots that can seamlessly collaborate with humans and other machines presents layers of complexities and engineering challenges. These include replicating human-like perception, degrees of freedom, dexterity, mobility, cognition, and whole body control. 

This demands accelerated progress in robotics research fields and technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, physics -based simulation, sensor technologies, and mechatronics.

Advancing Humanoid Robot Efforts

NVIDIA is developing the accelerated systems, tools, services, algorithms, and other robot technologies that can be used to build general-purpose human form factor robots.

Three Computer Framework

Humanoid robots need to sense, plan, and act within a given environment, which involves processing large amounts of data in real time. This requires training foundation models that power the robot brain, simulating and validating the robots, and finally deploying these models onto the actual robot.

The three AI systems are: 

NVIDIA Isaac GR00T

GR00T is a research initiative and development platform for general-purpose robot foundation models and data pipelines, to accelerate humanoid robotics.

Robot Learning & Simulation Framework

Experimenting on physical robot hardware can be expensive and impractical at scale. Robot learning and testing frameworks like NVIDIA Isaac Sim™ and NVIDIA Isaac Lab—built on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform—enable physically accurate simulations for training and validating multiple humanoid robot agents in parallel.  

Using domain randomization to train the agents across a variety of environments and conditions builds robustness into the policies, enabling the robot to operate in novel environments and terrains.  

Isaac Lab is an open-source unified robot learning framework built on Isaac Sim that can be used to apply these learning techniques to train a robot policy. 

Isaac Sim is a reference application that helps you build, simulate, and test AI-driven robotics solutions in physically based virtual environments.

Agility Robotics

GR00T Workflows

Data Generation and Processing

There’s a tremendous need for multimodal data to get a rich understanding of robot surroundings. Gathering extensive datasets for robotics is challenging and synthetic data can address this data gap. 

Create: Simulated assets such as visually diverse scenes, objects, and textures using GR00T-Gen workflow let you apply domain randomization, build effective robot policies in simulation, and deploy it in the real world.

Training a humanoid robot with diverse robot scenes and objects

Generate: Humanoids can also learn from observations and replication of actions from human demonstrations. With GR00T-Mimic, you can generate motion data and trajectories from teleoperated demonstrations.

Teleoperating a Fourier humanoid robot

Compress: The NVIDIA Cosmos Tokenizer suite of neural tokenizers helps you more efficiently process image and video data in real time and simulate future events in an environment. Now, you can maintain higher image quality, produce 8X the compression rate, and perform 12X better than current state-of-the-art methods. NVIDIA Nemo can then be used to train or fine-tune video foundation models.

Dextrous Manipulation

Humanoid robot grasping functionality requires human-like dextrous object manipulation capabilities that can perform gross and fine-grained dexterous manipulation. GR00T-Dexterity is a suite of models and policies that uses a reinforcement learning-based approach and reference workflows to develop them.

Galbot is using Isaac Lab and Isaac Sim today to build and validate a vast number of grasps and demonstrated zero-shot, sim-to-real transfer.

Robot Mobility

General-purpose navigation in complex and dynamic environments requires extensive tuning. With the GR00T-Mobility novel reference workflow, you can create a mobility generalist for navigating across varied settings and robot embodiments.

Isaac Sim-based warehouse environment with humanoid, quadruped, and forklift navigation scenes

Whole Body Control

Whole-body control of a humanoid robot can be challenging as it requires both stable dextrous manipulation and robust locomotion. GR00T-Control is a suite of advanced motion planning and control models, policies, and reference workflows to streamline the development of effective control systems for humanoid robots. With GR00T-Control, you can train robust, whole-body motion autonomous policies through imitation learning and demonstrate humanoid whole-body skill learning for dexterous manipulation and locomotion from teleoperated datasets.

AI-based Robot Perception

To enhance situational awareness and interaction efficiency for humanoid robots, they need to have long-term memory with details about events, spaces, personalized settings, and context-aware responses. 

GR00T-Perception helps make this possible with a suite of perception libraries, foundation models, and reference workflows built using Isaac Sim and Isaac ROS.

Orchestrating GR00T Workflows

The GR00T workflows can be orchestrated with NVIDIA OSMO a cloud-native orchestration service for scaling complex, multi-stage, and multi-container ‌robotics workloads across a hybrid infrastructure.

The Next-Generation, On-Robot Computing Platform

Robot hardware is also crucial for running an ensemble of multimodel AI models that power humanoids with the right performance, latency, and functional safety in diverse conditions. 

NVIDIA Jetson Thor, based on NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPU architecture, delivers 800 teraflops of AI performance and is integrated with a functional safety processor. This delivers the necessary capabilities to power the new generation of humanoids.

Get Started

Join the NVIDIA Humanoid Robot Developer Program for exclusive early access to NVIDIA-accelerated computing systems—from cloud to edge. These include the Jetson Thor computing platform, robot workflow orchestration services, foundation models, robot learning, and simulation frameworks.

Resources

Synthetic Data

Close the sim-to-real gap by creating physically accurate virtual scenes and objects to train AI models while saving on training time and costs. 

Robot Learning

Apply reinforcement learning and imitation learning techniques to any type of robot embodiment, and build robot policies using NVIDIA Isaac Lab, an open-source robot learning framework.

Simulation

Isaac Sim is a robot simulation framework built on top of NVIDIA Omniverse that provides high-fidelity photo-realistic simulations to train humanoid robots.

Jetson Thor

NVIDIA Jetson Thor, based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture,  enables humanoid robots to run complex multimodal AI models.

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