The first robot in Nvidia’s new research line is a collaboration with three flags on it. The body comes from China’s Unitree, the hands from Singapore-headquartered Sharpa, and the computing brain from Nvidia.After Jensen Huang’s keynote in Taipei on Monday, ahead of the Computex trade show, the company said it plans to repeat the exercise with humanoid makers in the United States, Europe and South Korea.The machine announced this week is a standardised version of Unitree’s H2 robot, built as a reference platform for academic researchers. The idea is to give labs a common piece of hardware to develop on rather than each building or buying a different machine.
Researchers at Stanford University and the University of California San Diego are among those who plan to use it, along with Seattle-based Ai2, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, the Stanford Robotics Center, and UC San Diego’s Advanced Robotics and Controls Laboratory. Sales, primarily to research institutions, are set to start later this year.
The robot uses Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T platform, the software and reference-hardware stack the company has been building out for humanoid development, which is the connective tissue across these partnerships rather than any single chassis.
