Nvidia's GR00T N1 is poised to revolutionize the landscape of humanoid robotics by providing a customizable foundation model for developers worldwide. Unveiled in March 2025, GR00T N1 (Generalist Robot 00 Technology) is designed to enable robots to reason, learn, and adapt to a variety of tasks and environments, mimicking human-like cognitive processes.

At its core, the GR00T N1 operates on a dual-system architecture, mirroring human cognition. "System 1" is a fast-thinking component, enabling quick reflexes and intuitive actions. "System 2" provides deliberate, methodical decision-making, powered by a vision language model that analyzes the environment and instructions to formulate action plans. This system then translates these plans into precise, continuous movements executed by the robot. This dual-system allows the robot to perceive and reason about its environment and instructions.

The GR00T N1 model comes pre-trained with the ability to perform basic functions like grasping, moving objects, and transferring items between arms, as well as multistep tasks. Nvidia suggests that these motor skills might be of use for functions like material handling, packaging, and inspection. What sets GR00T N1 apart is its open and customizable nature. Developers can further train the model to fit their specific purposes with real or synthetic data, generated using Nvidia's Isaac GR00T Blueprint. This blueprint allows for the creation of vast datasets of synthetic data, significantly accelerating the training process and improving the robot's performance. In fact, Nvidia generated 780,000 synthetic trajectories which is the equivalent of 6,500 hours of human demonstration data, in just 11 hours. By combining synthetic data with real-world data, Nvidia improved GR00T N1's performance by 40%

Nvidia is making the GR00T N1 training data and task evaluation scenarios available for download from Hugging Face and GitHub. The Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic manipulation motion generation is also available as an interactive demo on build.nvidia.com or for download from GitHub.

Nvidia is also developing Newton, an open-source physics engine in collaboration with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, specifically engineered for the creation of robots.

The potential applications of GR00T N1 span numerous industries facing labor shortages. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang believes that the world will face a severe shortage of human laborers by the end of the decade and sees robots as a solution. GR00T N1's capabilities can be applied across various sectors, including material handling, packaging, and quality inspection. Furthermore, its ability to learn and adapt makes it suitable for dynamic environments such as warehouses and factories.

Several leading humanoid developers have already gained early access to GR00T N1, including Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics, and NEURA Robotics. These companies are leveraging the foundation model to enhance the capabilities of their robots and develop new applications. 1X’s humanoid robot has demonstrated its ability to perform domestic tidying tasks using a post-trained policy built on GR00T N1.

Nvidia has also announced the DGX Spark personal AI supercomputer, providing developers with a turnkey system to expand GR00T N1’s capabilities for new robots, tasks, and environments without extensive custom programming.