Sharpa’s Wave tactile five-finger robot hands have been integrated into the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, a reference design built on the Isaac GR00T development platform for dexterous and tactile manipulation.
The configuration combines a Unitree H2 Plus humanoid robot with Sharpa Wave hands, NVIDIA Jetson Thor-powered onboard computing and Isaac GR00T software workflows. The system is intended for developers and researchers working on robot skill development, fine-tuning and deployment, with the goal of reducing the time required to set up humanoid robot development environments.
The reference design is aimed at addressing the fragmented workflow involved in humanoid robotics development, including hardware integration, data collection, simulation, training, evaluation and deployment. By combining the robot body, tactile hands, onboard compute and software workflows into one integrated system, the configuration is designed to support a faster transition from robot setup to skill development and physical validation.
“Our vision is to make robots genuinely productive — by advancing fine manipulation skills through dexterous, tactile hardware and the AI models that power them,” said David Li, founder of Sharpa. “Partnering with NVIDIA on a humanoid robot reference design and end-to-end development solution is a meaningful step toward deploying robots that can perform real work, in real settings.”
The system includes two Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, each with 22 degrees of freedom. Together with the humanoid body, the system has 75 total degrees of freedom across the hands and body. The hands include a Digital Tactile Array with more than 1,000 pixels per fingertip and 0.02N pressure sensitivity, supporting manipulation tasks such as in-hand rotation and bimanual operation.
The humanoid chassis is based on Unitree’s H2 platform, which provides 31 degrees of freedom across the body. Onboard computing is provided by the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Thor T5000, which includes NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, an Arm CPU, 128 GB of unified memory and a configurable power range.
“Dexterous hands are essential for humanoid robots to perform useful manipulation tasks in the real world,” said Spencer Huang, director of product for robotics at NVIDIA. “With Sharpa Wave tactile five-finger hands, NVIDIA Isaac GR00T and Isaac Teleop, the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot gives developers a reference design for training robot skills that require touch, control and precision.”
The Sharpa Wave hands can be used with NVIDIA Isaac Teleop to capture upper-body demonstration data for dexterous manipulation training and policy development. The system also supports simulation, training and evaluation of dexterous and tactile manipulation policies using Sharpa Wave tactile parameters within Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab before deployment on physical hardware. According to the companies, the configuration can also be used to deploy manipulation policies in real time using NVIDIA Jetson for on-robot inference and control.
