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

Core Insights - NVIDIA has launched a portfolio of technologies aimed at enhancing humanoid robot development, featuring the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1, which is the first open and fully customizable foundation model for humanoid reasoning and skills [1][3][11] Group 1: Technology Overview - The GR00T N1 model includes a dual-system architecture inspired by human cognition, consisting of a fast-thinking action model (System 1) and a slow-thinking decision-making model (System 2) [4][5] - GR00T N1 is designed to generalize across common tasks and can perform multistep tasks, making it applicable in various use cases such as material handling and inspection [6] - NVIDIA has introduced the Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic data generation, which allows developers to create large amounts of synthetic motion data from limited human demonstrations [16][17] Group 2: Collaborations and Partnerships - NVIDIA is collaborating with Google DeepMind and Disney Research to develop Newton, an open-source physics engine that enhances robots' ability to learn complex tasks [9][10] - Disney Research plans to utilize Newton to advance its robotic character platform, aiming to create more engaging and expressive robotic characters [13][14] Group 3: Performance and Data Generation - NVIDIA generated 780,000 synthetic trajectories in 11 hours, equating to 6,500 hours of human demonstration data, which improved GR00T N1's performance by 40% when combined with real data [17] - The GR00T N1 dataset is now available as part of a larger open-source physical AI dataset, providing valuable training data for developers [18][19] Group 4: Availability and Future Developments - The GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios are available for download, with the Newton physics engine expected to be released later this year [20]