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Nvidia, the chipmaker that has bloomed into an AI technology giant, unrolled a series of initiatives designed to “supercharge” humanoid robot development.
Among those projects: Nvidia announced a collaboration with Disney Research and Google‘s DeepMind AI lab to develop Newton, described as an open-source physics engine that lets robots learn how to handle complex tasks with greater precision.
“The age of generalist robotics is here,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said during his keynote Tuesday kicking off the company’s 2025 GTC developers conference.
Disney Research will be one of the first partners to use Newton. The Mouse House plans to employ the AI-based tech to advance its robotic character platform that powers next-generation entertainment robots, such as the Star Wars-inspired “BDX” droids that joined Huang on stage during his 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,” Kyle Laughlin, senior VP at Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, said in a statement. “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.”
Also Tuesday, Nvidia announced Isaac GR00T N1, touted as the first open, fully customizable foundation model for generalized humanoid reasoning and skills. Available now, GR00T N1 is the first of a family of fully customizable models that Nvidia expects to release to worldwide robotics developers.
Huang, during his keynote, 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. “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,” Huang said.
Nvidia said 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. Additional developers with early access to GR00T N1 include Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and Neura Robotics.
