Nvidia has partnered with Chinese robotics champion Unitree Robotics and Singapore robotic hand maker Sharpa to release a new humanoid robot reference design to accelerate innovation in the global humanoid industry, the US chip giant’s CEO, Jensen Huang, announced on Monday.

The new design, called H2+ or Isaac GR00T, will support industry-wide humanoid robotics research by streamlining the full development workflow for developers, including data collection, policy training and real-world deployment.

“For agentic systems, robotic systems and physical AI, data is the hardest problem,” Huang said in a keynote speech delivered on Monday at the Computex conference in Taipei, Asia’s biggest tech expo.

“You’ve seen us moving up this ladder,” he added.

In the robotics industry, reference designs function as blueprints that other industry participants can adopt and customise. Nvidia has contributed to such designs as it looks to make itself an indispensable software and hardware supplier in the growing robotics industry.

H2+ is made up of Unitree’s human-sized H2 humanoid robot body and Sharpa’s flagship Wave five-fingered robot hands, with Nvidia’s Isaac GR00T foundational models providing the advanced reasoning capabilities that function as the robot’s “brain”.