NVIDIA Announces Isaac GR00T N1 — the World’s First Open Humanoid Robot Foundation Model — and Simulation Frameworks to Speed Robot Development

Rhea-AI Summary

NVIDIA has unveiled groundbreaking technologies for humanoid robot development, headlined by the Isaac GR00T N1, the world's first open, customizable foundation model for humanoid reasoning and skills. The announcement, made on March 18, 2025, includes collaboration with Google DeepMind and Disney Research to develop Newton, an open-source physics engine.

GR00T N1 features a dual-system architecture: System 1 for fast-thinking actions and System 2 for methodical decision-making. The model can handle common tasks like grasping and moving objects, addressing global labor shortages estimated at over 50 million people.

Key developments include:

• The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic data generation
• A collaboration to develop MuJoCo-Warp, expected to accelerate robotics machine learning workloads by 70x
• Generation of 780,000 synthetic trajectories in just 11 hours, equivalent to 9 months of human demonstration data
• Early access partners including Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and others

Positive

• Launch of world's first open humanoid robot foundation model
• Partnerships with major tech companies (Google DeepMind, Disney Research)
• 40% performance improvement through synthetic data integration
• 70x acceleration in robotics machine learning workloads
• Addresses global labor shortage of 50+ million people

Negative

• Newton physics engine not immediately available
• Requires post-training with real or synthetic data for specific tasks

Insights

Technology Industry Analyst

NVIDIA's launch of Isaac GR00T N1 represents a significant strategic expansion beyond its core GPU business into the humanoid robotics space. This isn't merely a new product but a foundational platform play that positions NVIDIA at the center of an emerging robotics ecosystem.

The dual-system architecture of GR00T N1 - with its fast-thinking "System 1" and deliberate "System 2" - creates a comprehensive solution for the complex challenges of general-purpose robotics. By making this model open and customizable, NVIDIA is employing the same ecosystem strategy that has served it well in AI development tools.

The high-profile collaborations with Google DeepMind and Disney Research demonstrate NVIDIA's ability to form strategic partnerships that enhance their platform value. The Newton physics engine collaboration is particularly strategic as physics simulation remains one of the most computationally intensive aspects of robotics development - conveniently requiring the powerful GPUs NVIDIA sells.

The company explicitly targets the global labor shortage (estimated at over 50 million people) as the market opportunity, signaling NVIDIA's intent to position this technology as an economic solution rather than merely a technological achievement. By addressing data generation challenges through synthetic data creation - generating 6,500 hours of demonstration data in just 11 hours - NVIDIA is tackling one of the critical bottlenecks in robotics development.

For investors, this launch represents NVIDIA's continued ability to identify and create new markets that leverage their core AI and GPU expertise, potentially opening new revenue streams beyond traditional computing markets.

Robotics Specialist

NVIDIA's GR00T N1 addresses several fundamental challenges that have hindered humanoid robot development. The dual cognitive architecture mimics human thought processes, with a fast-thinking system for reflexive actions and a deliberate reasoning system for complex tasks - solving the integration problem that has plagued humanoid development.

The partnership roster includes virtually every major player in the humanoid space - 1X, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and NEURA Robotics. This widespread adoption potential suggests the platform could become the standard foundation for humanoid development, similar to how ROS (Robot Operating System) became standard for traditional robotics.

The synthetic data generation capabilities are perhaps the most underappreciated aspect of this announcement. The 40% performance improvement achieved by combining synthetic with real data demonstrates how NVIDIA is solving the data scarcity problem that has bottlenecked robot learning. Generating 780,000 synthetic trajectories in 11 hours - equivalent to nine months of human demonstrations - represents a step-change in training efficiency.

The collaboration with Google DeepMind to create MuJoCo-Warp promises a 70x acceleration in robotics machine learning workloads, which could dramatically compress development cycles. Disney's participation introduces an entertainment dimension that could accelerate consumer acceptance of robotics.

By making both the model and dataset open-source, NVIDIA facilitates academic research while maintaining their competitive advantage in the hardware required to run these intensive workloads effectively. This announcement establishes NVIDIA as not just a chip provider but a comprehensive robotics platform company with a potential moat in humanoid robot development tools.

• Now Available, Fully Customizable Foundation Model Brings Generalized Skills and Reasoning to Humanoid Robots
• NVIDIA, Google DeepMind and Disney Research Collaborate to Develop Next-Generation Open-Source Newton Physics Engine
• New Omniverse Blueprint for Synthetic Data Generation and Open-Source Dataset Jumpstart Physical AI Data Flywheel
  

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 18, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- GTC -- NVIDIA today announced a portfolio of technologies to supercharge humanoid robot development, including NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, the world’s first open, fully customizable foundation model for generalized humanoid reasoning and skills.

The other technologies include simulation frameworks and blueprints such as the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for generating synthetic data, as well as Newton, an open-source physics engine — under development with Google DeepMind and Disney Research — purpose-built for developing robots.

Available now, GR00T N1 is the first of a family of fully customizable models that NVIDIA will pretrain and release to worldwide robotics developers — accelerating the transformation of industries challenged by global labor shortages estimated at more than 50 million people.

“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 these plans into precise, 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 easily 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. These 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. “NVIDIA’s GR00T N1 model provides a major breakthrough for robot reasoning and skills. With a minimal amount of post-training data, we were able to fully deploy on NEO Gamma — furthering our mission of creating robots that are not tools, but companions that can assist 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 critical for robot development but costly to capture. For humanoids, real-world human demonstration data is limited by a person’s 24-hour day.

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 lets developers generate exponentially large amounts of synthetic motion data for manipulation tasks from a small number of 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 now available on Hugging Face.

Availability
NVIDIA GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios are now available for download from Hugging Face and GitHub. The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic manipulation motion generation is also now available as an interactive demo on build.nvidia.com or to download from GitHub.

The NVIDIA DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer, also announced today at GTC, 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.

Learn more by watching the NVIDIA GTC keynote and register to attend key Humanoid Developer Day sessions, including:

• “An Introduction to Building Humanoid Robots” for a deep dive into NVIDIA Isaac GR00T;
• “Insights Into Disney’s Robotic Character Platform” to learn how Disney Research redefines entertainment robotics with BDX droids; and
• “Announcing Mujoco-Warp and Newton: How Google DeepMind and NVIDIA Are Supercharging Robotics Development” for a deeper look into these new technologies and how Google deploys AI models to train AI-powered humanoids for real-world tasks.
  

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) is the world leader in accelerated computing.

For further information, contact:
Kristin Bryson
Enterprise Communications
NVIDIA Corporation
+1-203-241-9190
kbryson@nvidia.com

Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to the benefits, impact, availability, and performance of NVIDIA’s products, services, and technologies; NVIDIA’s collaborations with third parties; third parties adopting or offering NVIDIA’s products and technologies; and with NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1 and new data generation and robot-learning frameworks, robotics developers everywhere opening the next frontier in the age of AI are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic conditions; our reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test our products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to our existing product and technologies; market acceptance of our products or our partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of our products or technologies when integrated into systems; as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.

Many of the products and features described herein remain in various stages and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. The statements above are not intended to be, and should not be interpreted as a commitment, promise, or legal obligation, and the development, release, and timing of any features or functionalities described for our products is subject to change and remains at the sole discretion of NVIDIA. NVIDIA will have no liability for failure to deliver or delay in the delivery of any of the products, features or functions set forth herein.

© 2025 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA Isaac are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/65cf6342-e940-44c0-a40c-dfe09ac433c9

FAQ

What is NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T N1 and how does it revolutionize humanoid robotics?

GR00T N1 is the world's first open foundation model for humanoid robots, featuring dual-system architecture for fast and methodical thinking, enabling tasks like grasping and object manipulation.

How much performance improvement does NVIDIA's synthetic data provide for GR00T N1?

By combining synthetic with real data, NVIDIA improved GR00T N1's performance by 40% compared to using only real data.

What is the significance of NVIDIA's collaboration with Google DeepMind and Disney Research?

The collaboration focuses on developing Newton, an open-source physics engine that will accelerate robot learning workloads by 70x through MuJoCo-Warp integration.

How does NVIDIA's GR00T Blueprint address the data generation challenge in robotics?

The Blueprint generated 780,000 synthetic trajectories (equivalent to 9 months of human demonstration) in just 11 hours, significantly accelerating robot training.

When will NVIDIA's new robotics technologies be available to developers?

GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios are available now on Hugging Face and GitHub, while the Newton physics engine is expected later in the year.