Germany's Agile Robots plans to build 1,000 to 2,000 small humanoid robots next year with Nvidia, CEO Zhaopeng Chen told Reuters on Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2026, at Nvidia's GTC conference in Berlin. Production is due to begin late this year. The robot, Agile ONE SN, is a reference platform aimed at research labs, with availability scheduled for early 2027.
The specs
- Body: 1.40 m (4.59 ft) tall, 40 kg (88 lb), 31 degrees of freedom and a 3 kg payload per arm, per Nvidia.
- Hands: two WUJI Hand 2 five-finger hands, each with 20 degrees of freedom, 1 kHz force control and tactile sensing.
- Compute: Nvidia Jetson Thor onboard, rated at 2,070 FP4 teraflops with 128 GB of unified memory.
- Software: preconfigured with Nvidia's Isaac GR00T foundation model and workflow, with Nvidia's Halos safety system planned.
- Sensors: head and wrist cameras, lidar and inertial measurement units.
Nvidia says the platform cuts researchers' setup time "from weeks to days," and named Stanford University and ETH Zurich as interested institutions. "General-purpose robotics is advancing at extraordinary speed — the ChatGPT moment for robotics is fast approaching," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Also announced
Nvidia made Isaac Lab 3.0 generally available, released an open source runtime called Isaac OS, and published a SimReady library of more than 2,000 simulation assets on Hugging Face. On stage, Huang showed off Microduck robots from Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics; Reuters noted one needed "extra persuasion" to take a nap on command.
What it means for Tesla
Agile ONE SN is a research tool, not a factory worker, so it isn't a direct rival to Optimus. But it's another sign that Nvidia's stack is becoming the default for humanoid makers outside Tesla, which trains Optimus in-house. For more humanoid news today, see Unitree's H2-X and Nvidia's other GTC Berlin news.