Nvidia‘s CEO Jensen Huang recently discusses the multitrillion-dollar economic opportunity presented by the adoption of humanoid robots in industry, as it announced a model for academics using hardware from Unitree and Sharpa intended to accelerate advances.
In an announcement made at Computex 2026 in Taipei, Taiwan, the executive backed humanoid robotics to “bring physical AI to the world’s largest industries” but indicated there were barriers to academic work to this end, which it aims to resolve by introduction of the “reference robot”.
The machine uses Nvidia compute systems and Isaac GR00T development platform, a Unitree H2 body standing at almost 6 feet tall and weighing 50 pounds in weight, and Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands.
“Nvidia Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives researchers a single, open platform to make breakthrough discoveries toward general-purpose physical intelligence”, Huang added.
During his keynote at the event Huang explained “we built this for higher education and university researchers, because for them to build this is insanely hard to do”, pointing to the complexities and expense of starting from scratch in every project.
Nvidia noted by using its “compute and open software stack” at the core “the reference design gives research teams a more unified, secure foundation for advancing humanoid robotics”.
Discussing Sharpa’s role founder David Li said “partnering with Nvidia on a humanoid robot reference design and end-to-end development solution is a meaningful step toward deploying robots that can perform real work, in real settings”.
The executive added its “vision is to make robots genuinely productive – by advancing fine manipulation skills through dexterous, tactile hardware and the AI models that power them”.
Source: Mobile World Live
Image Credit: Nvidia