Project GR00T and Its Ambition to Influence Robotics

For those attending NVIDIA’s annual developer conference on Monday, the company’s new announcement must have been exciting. Nvidia unveiled Project GR00T, an ambitious plan to release a software and hardware platform that can be used to build human-like robots which will continue to learn through generative artificial intelligence (AI).

The company says its new launch will enable robots to be smarter and more functional than ever before – and they'll accomplish this by watching humans. The platform is made up of a computer system to power the robot and AI, along with a suite of software that includes various tools like genAI, to build human-like robots.

According to NVIDIA, Project GR00T is a “general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, designed to further its work driving breakthroughs in robotics and embodied AI.”

“Building foundation models for general humanoid robots is one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “The enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists around the world to take giant leaps towards artificial general robotics.”

NVIDIA says it is building a comprehensive AI platform for leading humanoid robot companies such as 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics and XPENG Robotics, among others.

Jim Fan a research manager and lead of embodied AI at Nvidia posted to X that through GR00T, robots will be able to understand instructions through language, video and demonstrations to perform a variety of tasks.

“Today is the beginning of our moonshot to solve embodied AGI in the physical world. I’m so excited to announce Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning. The GR00T model will enable a robot to understand multimodal instructions, such as language, video, and demonstration, and perform a variety of useful tasks. We are collaborating with many leading humanoid companies around the world, so that GR00T may transfer across embodiments and help the ecosystem thrive. GR00T is born on NVIDIA’s deep technology stack. We simulate in Isaac Lab (new app on Omniverse Isaac Sim for humanoid learning), train on OSMO (new compute orchestration system to scale up models), and deploy to Jetson Thor (new edge GPU chip designed to power GR00T). Announced in Jensen's keynote, Project GR00T is a cornerstone for the “Foundation Agent” roadmap of the newly founded GEAR Lab. At GEAR, we are building generally capable agents that learn to act skillfully in many worlds, virtual and real… Join us on the journey to land on the moon.”

What makes this project so exciting is the fact that it opens an entirely new horizon and vision for the future of robotics, GenAI, and human capability. This technology, coupled with robots, is expected to assist humans in accomplishing more in the future.

Whether in healthcare, home life, logistics, travel, manufacturing, space exploration, or the military, robots equipped with GenAI will likely make our lives incredibly easier and more advanced. This next generation of robotics and computing is likely to lead to incredible breakthroughs, providing humans with super-human capabilities that only robots and advanced technology can provide.

NVIDIA’s announcement is exciting. We can expect great inventions and capabilities to emerge from this technology over the next decade.

People beware; the robots are coming!