Codename GROOT! NVIDIA is going to create "Universal Humanoid Robot Basic Model"
Huang Renxun said, "Building a basic model of a general humanoid robot is one of the most exciting problems we can solve in the field of AI today."
At this week's annual GTC developer conference, NVIDIA unveiled a humanoid robot project called GR00T, which may pay homage to the Marvel Universe superhero Groot.
NVIDIA refers to this new platform as the "Universal Humanoid Robot Basic Model." Essentially, NVIDIA is providing an AI platform for the emerging humanoid robot manufacturers, including 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Ubtech Robotics, and XPeng, among others. This covers almost all well-known humanoid robot manufacturers, with a few exceptions like Tesla.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed that robots supported by this platform will be designed to understand natural language and mimic actions by observing human behavior, enabling them to quickly learn coordination, flexibility, and other skills to navigate, adapt, interact with the real world, and never cause a robot uprising.
Huang said, "Building the basic model of a universal humanoid robot is one of the most exciting problems we can solve in the field of AI today. These technologies are coming together to enable leading roboticists around the world to make huge leaps in the field of universal humanoid robots."
GR00T will also support NVIDIA's new hardware. Continuing the theme of the Marvel Universe, Jetson Thor is a new computer designed specifically for running humanoid robot simulation workflows, generative AI models, and more.
NVIDIA also mentioned the new chip: "The system chip contains the next-generation GPU based on the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture and is equipped with a transformer engine, providing 8 trillion floating-point AI performance, capable of running multimodal generative AI models like GR00T. It integrates a secure processing unit, high-performance CPU cluster, and 100GB Ethernet bandwidth, greatly simplifying design and integration work."