Episode 5: Real Robots, Real Results – GR00T N1 in Action

Shaoqing Tan
Tue, 22 Jul 2025 07:02:40 GMT

Welcome to Episode 5! Now that we know what GR00T N1 is capable of in theory and controlled tests, let’s explore how it’s being used in practice. This episode is all about real-world deployments and industry adoption. We’ll discuss how companies and research teams are integrating GR00T N1 into actual robots, and what early results they’re seeing. It’s one thing to have a cool demo in a lab, but it’s another to bring that tech into the real world where things are messy, unpredictable, and where ROI matters. So, who’s using GR00T N1 and why are they excited about it?

First off, NVIDIA didn’t create GR00T N1 just as an academic exercise; it’s part of their Isaac platform for robotics, which means they envision it being a core component for robot developers everywhere. They made the model available for download via popular AI model hubs, and provided documentation and tools to get it running on different robots. That means from day one, the wider community could jump in. And jump in they did.

Let’s start with some of the early adopters that NVIDIA has mentioned:

1X Technologies: We mentioned them last episode. 1X is a startup building humanoid robots aimed at real-life tasks, such as assisting in home or retail environments. They took GR00T N1 and applied it to their robot “NEO”. After a bit of custom training (what we call post-training or fine-tuning), NEO was able to perform domestic chores like tidying up a living space autonomously. This includes recognizing objects that are out of place, picking them up, and organizing them properly, all based on high-level instructions. For instance, “NEO, please clean up the toys in the living room,” would kick off a sequence of the robot identifying toys scattered around, picking them one by one, and placing them in a bin. The incredible part is that 1X didn’t write special code for “toy cleaning” – they leveraged the general capabilities of GR00T N1, and it generalized to this task with minimal extra data. This demonstration really showed people that, wow, a single model can handle such an unstructured task in a real home-like environment.

Fourier Intelligence: This company’s GR-1 humanoid, which we also discussed, was one of the testbeds for GR00T N1. Fourier is aiming to create affordable humanoid robots. By using GR00T N1, they gained a ready-made skill set for the GR-1 robot. Internally, their tests (like the language-guided dual-arm tasks we described before) validated that even a new robot platform could benefit from the model quickly. For Fourier, this means they can focus on improving hardware and not spend years solely on AI software, since NVIDIA’s model gives them a leap forward.

Agility Robotics: Known for the bipedal robot Digit that walks on two legs and can use its arms to pick things up, Agility Robotics was evaluating GR00T N1 for giving Digit more autonomy. Imagine Digit not just walking and carrying boxes (which it was already good at), but actually understanding verbal instructions like “grab that package from shelf A and put it on conveyor B.” A foundation model like GR00T N1 could make that possible without Agility having to collect an enormous dataset themselves.

Boston Dynamics: They’re famous for robots like Atlas (a humanoid) and Spot (the quadruped). Boston Dynamics robots have historically used a lot of custom, task-specific programming to pull off their flashy demos (like Atlas doing parkour or Spot dancing). With GR00T N1, Boston Dynamics could experiment with letting a general AI policy control some behaviors. For example, instead of programming Atlas explicitly for each stunt, they might use GR00T N1 to handle some manipulation tasks or respond to spoken commands. There’s no public info yet on exactly what BD has done with it, but their involvement signals that even the leaders in robot hardware are looking to foundation models as the future of robot “brains.”

Industrial Users (Foxlink, Lightwheel, etc.): On the industrial side, companies like Foxlink (a manufacturing tech firm) and Lightwheel are listed as adopting GR00T models. These companies might use humanoid or arm-based robots in factories. The model’s general skills like sorting objects or assembling components from instructions could greatly speed up deploying robots in new assembly lines. One early adopter called AeiRobot used GR00T N1 with their robot (named ALICE) to follow natural language instructions and do complex pick-and-place workflows in an industrial setting. For them, a model that understands “Pick up the blue gear from bin 3 and attach it to the axle” without needing explicit programming for that exact instruction is immensely powerful.

Apart from individual companies, GR00T N1 is sparking a broader ecosystem. NVIDIA introduced GR00T-Mimic and GR00T-Dreams, which are blueprints or tools that help users generate synthetic training data to fine-tune or enhance models like N1. For example, GR00T-Mimic uses simulation to augment existing datasets (maybe you have 10 real demos of a task, it can simulate variations to turn that into 100), and GR00T-Dreams can even generate entirely new imagined scenarios. In a keynote, NVIDIA’s CEO showed how using one snapshot of a new environment, GR00T-Dreams could simulate a robot performing new tasks in that environment, then convert those simulated experiences into training data for the model. This means if a user wants to adapt GR00T N1 to a very specific new task, they don’t always have to physically demonstrate it dozens of times; they can leverage these tools to amplify their data. It’s a cloud-to-robot pipeline: heavy-lifting of learning happens in the cloud (where data is generated and the model is trained), and then the smarter model is deployed to the robot on the ground.

Let’s illustrate a concrete scenario: Suppose a factory wants a humanoid robot to handle a new part in an assembly process – something like picking up a fragile glass component and fitting it into a machine. They can take GR00T N1 as a base. Then, using simulation, they create virtual scenes of that robot performing the task with the glass component (maybe using CAD models and physics simulation for realism). GR00T-Dreams helps generate a bunch of simulated trials, including variations like different positions or slight changes in the glass component’s orientation. Then they fine-tune GR00T N1 on this augmented dataset to specialize it a bit. Within perhaps a couple of days, they have a tailored model ready to deploy on the actual robot, which then can perform the task with a high success rate. This process could have taken months or longer if done manually, but with foundation models and synthetic data generation, it’s vastly accelerated.

The impact of all this in the robotics industry is significant. We’re seeing a shift in how people approach developing robot capabilities. Instead of writing custom code for each new robot task, developers are becoming more like “AI coaches” – they start with a pre-trained generalist (like GR00T N1) and then coach it with some additional data or tweaks to get the desired behavior. This is a more scalable approach. It’s akin to hiring an employee who already has a broad education and just giving them on-the-job training, versus trying to hire someone with zero experience and training them from scratch for every single duty.

We should also mention the collaborative efforts going on around GR00T N1. NVIDIA isn’t building this in isolation. They collaborated with others for related tech – for example, they’re working with Google DeepMind and Disney Research on a new physics simulation engine called Newton (yes, named after that Newton). Newton is being designed to improve how robots learn physics in simulation. It will be open-source and is optimized for robotics. This kind of tool will feed into better synthetic data for models like GR00T. It also integrates with things like Google’s MuJoCo physics sim. Essentially, while GR00T N1 is the brain, things like Newton and Isaac Sim are the training gyms. The better the gym equipment (physics realism, etc.), the better the training you can give to the brain.

So far, the real-world results with GR00T N1 have been promising. Robots are accomplishing tasks that would typically require lots of manual programming. Early users report that the model’s ability to follow language commands and adapt to new scenarios is a big leap. One metric that improved drastically with this new approach was language grounding – the robot’s ability to pick the correct object when told, for instance, “pick up the apple” in a scene with an apple and an orange. With older methods, the robot might get it right only half the time unless you trained it specifically on fruit identification. GR00T N1, coming pre-trained with a broad visual-language understanding, already knows what an apple is in visual terms and can follow that instruction correctly most of the time. And as an example of progress, the updated N1.5 version of the model pushed that even further (one test saw success rates jump from around 46% to over 90% in correctly following such pick-and-place language instructions on a real robot).

It’s worth noting that being “open” and “fully customizable” is a huge factor in why so many companies jumped on board. They aren’t locked into a black box; they can retrain the model on their own data, they can run it on their own hardware, and they can even contribute improvements back if they choose. This open model approach is somewhat new to robotics (where historically companies kept their AI secret sauce closed). We might be seeing the start of a more collaborative, community-driven advancement of robot intelligence, much like open-source software propelled computing.

As we near the end of our series, you might be wondering: what’s next? We’ve heard whispers of GR00T N1.5 already – an improved version. There’s talk of future models (perhaps an N2 down the line) with even more capabilities. In our final episode, we’ll look at these next steps and the bigger picture. How is GR00T N1 evolving, and what could it mean for the future of humanoid robots and AI? We’ll wrap up with a forward-looking discussion, including the early improvements seen in GR00T N1.5 and the vision of robots that can learn almost like humans do. Stick around for one more episode to complete our deep dive journey.

(Outro:) That’s a wrap for the real-world tour of GR00T N1 in action. We saw how this model is not just theory but is being put to work by innovative companies and researchers, from household chores to factory floors. In our final episode, we’ll peer into the future – how is this technology advancing and what could it lead to? Don’t miss it if you want to catch a glimpse of what’s coming on the horizon of robotics!