NVIDIA just announced the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot in a half-baked press release for Computex 2026, with an “available-soon reference workflow” and availability sometime by the end of the year with the Unitree H2 humanoid chassis.
One component of the kit that appears to be available now, albeit in limited quantity, is the Sharpa Wave high-end dexterous robotic hand with 22 degrees of freedom (DoF) and a dynamic tactile array (DTA) on each finger, enabling it to feel objects as lightweight as a butterfly.
Sharpa Wave robotic hand highlights:
- 1:1 scale human form – The palm width to hand length ratio is approximately 0.618, enabling the Wave to manipulate the same tools as humans.
- 22 active Degrees of Freedom – Isomorphic design mirroring the human hand
- Dynamic Tactile Array (DTA) powered by a proprietary neural network-based algorithm and sensing modules to enable detection of tight objects (like a butterfly)
- Maximum active fingertip force – 20 N
- Minimum grasp diameter – 10 mm
- Fingertip position repeatability – ±1 mm
- Control frequency – 500 Hz
- Movement speed across all gestures – > 4 Hz
- 5x fingers each with a tactile sensor and a torque sensor
- Host interface – Gigabit Ethernet
- Supply Voltage – 18-28V DC
- Power Consumption – 15W (static), up to 180W (transient peak)
- Dimensions – 208 × 90 × 50 mm
- Weight – 1.3 kg
- Durability and protection
- Press test – Validated 2.5 million times
- Friction test of fingertips – Verified over 4,000 km
- Impact test – Hundreds of impacts without damage
- Shock – 3200 cycles at 30 g acceleration
- Automatic protective clench within 0.10 seconds
- 1,000+ hours of continuous operation in a waving finger type of test.
The Sharpa Wave hand is designed for embodied AI research and for integration into robots, and the company provides ROS2 packages, MuJoCo URDF/MJCF simulation assets, and C++ and Python programming languages are supported on macOS and Linux hosts. You’ll find more technical details and instructions to get started on the documentation website.
The best way to understand the performance of the SharpaWave hands is probably to watch the demo below using teleoperation to put a garbage bag, peel an egg, and take a photo with a smartphone.
If instead, you’d like a more technical presentation about the hand and technology, you’ll want to watch the 28-minute video below.
The product page has no price information and instead, interested companies are asked to contact the sales team. However, 36kr Europe interviewed the company and mentioned a $50,000 price tag for the hand, and at the end of 2025, it was only possible to test the hand by visiting their office in Shanghai… This type of hand is made of tiny gears, which reminds me of the design of expensive Swiss watches, but we can only hope prices will come down, because with two hands in the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, we would expect a full kit for $150,000 to $200,000… At least I now understand why a $699 robotic hand is considered mid-range…
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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