NVIDIA adds Agile Robots' 40 kg Agile ONE SN to Isaac as its reference humanoid, due in early 2027

NVIDIA used GTC Berlin on Oct. 21 to add a reference humanoid robot to its Isaac platform: Agile ONE SN, built by Munich-based Agile Robots, preconfigured with Isaac GR00T and running on Jetson Thor. The machine is aimed at labs. Its Agile ONE S body stands 1.40 meters, weighs 40 kilograms and carries 3 kilograms per arm, and NVIDIA's release names Stanford University and ETH Zurich among the institutions interested when it ships in early 2027.

A standard body for GR00T research

The pitch is integration. NVIDIA says the platform puts simulation, training and deployment tools in one place, "cutting setup time from weeks to days." The hardware list reads like a data-collection rig: 31 degrees of freedom, two WUJI Hand 2 dexterous hands with 20 degrees of freedom each, 1kHz force control and tactile sensing, head and wrist cameras, lidar, and a Jetson Thor rated at 2,070 FP4 teraflops with 128GB of memory.

That makes Agile ONE SN closer to a lab instrument than a worker. Agile Robots plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 units next year for universities and corporate research labs, with ONE S and ONE SN production starting before the end of 2026, CEO Zhaopeng Chen told Reuters. Spencer Huang, NVIDIA's product director for robotics, said the pre-configuration could save researchers the two or three months spent getting separately purchased components to work together: "If we can bring researchers something that's already 80 per cent of the way there, it accelerates their development." A shared body lets research groups compare GR00T policies on the same hardware, which suits NVIDIA, whose other announcements that day were mostly software: Isaac Lab 3.0 is now generally available, Isaac OS is a new open source runtime built on Holoscan, and three reference workflows for DGX Station include refining GR00T 1.7 models with reinforcement learning. The SimReady library on Hugging Face holds more than 2,000 simulation-ready assets.

The case against reading it as a pure research kit is safety. Agile ONE SN is planned to integrate NVIDIA's Halos safety stack, and Agile Robots also appears on the list of partners building Halos into industrial safety architectures, next to Agility, Dexory, FORT Robotics and KION. Agile Robots, founded in 2018 by researchers from the German Aerospace Center, says it has installed more than 20,000 robot solutions.

Audi gets a different machine

The same day, Audi, Agile Robots, Dassault Systèmes and NVIDIA announced a proof of concept for parts sequencing at Audi's Ingolstadt plant. Audi's sequencing runs on around one million picks a day, and Audi board member Gerd Walker called picking in that process "one of the toughest automation challenges in automotive logistics." A virtual twin of the logistics area is being built in Dassault's DELMIA before the robots are deployed.

The robots in that project are Agile Robots' mobile humanoids, which put two arms on a mobile base and work at human height. Agile ONE SN, at 40 kilograms with 3 kilograms per arm, goes to research labs in early 2027; the mobile humanoids are already picking parts from material containers in Audi's Production Lab.