New robots, new capabilities. Tracking what's coming for the workforce.
Robotics Nvidia's October 2 blog post and Taiwan press reports on October 4 and 5 give the first quantified results for robots assembling the GB300 NVL72 tester tray at Foxconn: more than 95% success on the busbar, 90% to 95% on connector insertion, and a busbar cycle of about 160 seconds against a 124-second target.
Robotics LG and NVIDIA signed an MOU at NVIDIA's Santa Clara headquarters on August 13. The humanoid got the headline. The wheeled CLOiD got the deployment date, and it lands in a plant already running 200 mobile robots.
Robotics Automate 2026 opens in Chicago with the first-ever NVIDIA-sponsored Humanoid Pavilion — 20-plus humanoids moving from demo reels to a trade-show order desk.
Robotics NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T reference humanoid — Unitree H2 Plus body, Sharpa hands, Jetson Thor brain, 75 degrees of freedom — ships to Stanford, ETH Zurich, Ai2 and UC San Diego labs in late 2026.
Robotics On June 1, Nvidia announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot — Unitree H2 Plus chassis, Sharpa five-finger hands, Jetson Thor compute — the same morning Shanghai's STAR Market reviewed Unitree's 4.2B yuan IPO.
Robotics The 2026 Robotics Summit opens May 27-28 in Boston. Intrinsic CTO Brian Gerkey's Wednesday keynote argues open-source ROS must absorb the VLA architectural shift — or become a legacy layer under NVIDIA Isaac, Gemini Robotics, and Physical Intelligence's proprietary stacks. The fight is for the platform layer of an industry whose hardware just commoditised.
Robotics Fanuc and Nvidia tightened RoboGuide ↔ Isaac Sim into a bidirectional digital twin, dual-arm CRX learned to fold T-shirts via Isaac GR00T N, and the avoid-human demo jumped 7.5× on Jetson Thor.
Robotics On April 28 NVIDIA released Isaac GR00T N1.7 — an open, Apache-2.0, commercially licensable Vision-Language-Action model trained on 20,854 hours of human egocentric video. It ships with the first published scaling law for dexterous manipulation: going from 1k to 20k hours of human GoPro footage more than doubles task completion. Validated on Unitree G1, AGIBot Genie 1, and the YAM bimanual rig. Three different humanoids, one downloadable brain, no per-seat license.
Robotics A wheeled humanoid built by UK startup Humanoid and powered by Nvidia's physical-AI stack just did tote-handling at Siemens' Erlangen electronics plant — 60 moves per hour, over 8 hours uninterrupted, 90%+ pick-and-place success.