NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1: the open foundation model for humanoid robots unveiled at GTC
In one sentence At GTC on March 18, 2025 NVIDIA unveils Isaac GR00T N1, an open, customizable foundation model for humanoids with a dual-system architecture, together with a synthetic data blueprint and the Newton physics engine developed with Google DeepMind and Disney Research.
GR00T N1 is a pre-trained model that humanoid robot makers can use as a base and then adapt to their own robots with real or synthetic data, instead of starting from scratch. NVIDIA describes it as the first of a family of models it will pretrain and release.
The model reasons on two levels: a slow "System 2", based on a vision-language model, that interprets the environment and instructions and plans; and a fast "System 1" that turns the plan into continuous robot movements.
Training data and evaluation scenarios are published on Hugging Face and GitHub. Early-access companies include Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics, and NEURA Robotics; 1X showed its humanoid tidying a home with a policy derived from GR00T N1.
Companies
NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, Disney Research
Tools
Isaac GR00T N1, Isaac GR00T Blueprint, Newton, Cosmos Transfer, Omniverse
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