NVIDIA Announces Project GR00T

Foundation Model for Humanoid Robots 🤖

Hey Everyone,

I’m a bit tired today, I’ve been writing all day about Nvidia’s GTC conference and related AI announcements.

But Nvidia also made some pretty important announcements to my emerging tech coverage in general, including Project GR00T.

One of my favorite people to follow in Robotics is Jim Fan of Nvidia. I’m in the process of making a list of the top people to follow in Robotics.

13 hours ago this is what he shared on a LinkedIn Post:

AGI in the Physical World

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 humanoid 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 GTC 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. See if you can spot "GEAR" in the video ;)

So what’s clear is that Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla and around a dozen serious humanoid AI startups are working towards merging some aspects of Generative AI with robots.

Project GR00T emerges as Nvidia’s response to the growing interest in humanoid robots, proposing a general-purpose foundation model aimed at supporting a wide array of companies in this sector, such as Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and XPENG Robotics, among others.

When Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI participated in the funding of FigureAI’s latest round, you knew something was up.