NVIDIA on Tuesday announced Project GR00T, which is a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots. The company also unveiled a new computer called Jetson Thor for humanoid robots along with upgrades to its Isaac robotics platform. “Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today, The enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists around the world to take giant leaps towards artificial general robotics,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in a press statement. GR00T stands for “Generalist Robot 00 Technology,” and robots built on the platform can potentially understand natural language and mimic movements by observing actions. NVIDIA claims such robots can quickly learn coordination, dexterity and other skills, allowing them to navigate, adapt and interact with the real world. Jetson Thor for humanoid robots Jetson Thor is based on NVIDIA’s Thor system-on-a chip and the computing platform is intended to be capable of performing complex tasks as well as interacting “safely and naturally” with both people and machines. It features a modular architecture that is optimised for performance, power and size. NVIDIA is working with humanoid robot companies like Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics and XPENG Robotics to develop a comprehensive AI platform. “We are at an inflection point in history, with human-centric robots like Digit poised to change labour forever. Modern AI will accelerate development, paving the way for robots like Digit to help people in all aspects of daily life. We’re excited to partner with NVIDIA to invest in the computing, simulation tools, machine learning environments and other necessary infrastructure to enable the dream of robots being a part of daily life,” said Jonathan Hurst, cofounder and chief robot officer at Agility Robotics, in a press statement. NVIDIA’s Isaac platform NVIDIA also announced key upgrades to its Isaac robotics platform that powers GR00T. The Isaac tools used by Gr00T are capable of making new foundation models for any robot in any environment, according to the company. These tools include Isaac Lab for reinforcement learning and OSMO, which is an orchestration service. The company also announced Isaac Manipulator and Isaac Perceptor — pretrained models, libraries and reference hardware that help robots do what the names suggest.
