Landscape guide · from the README

GR00T Whole-Body Control: the full stack, mapped

MotionBricks is one layer of a bigger effort. This page maps the whole GR00T Whole-Body Control (WBC) codebase — the three pillars, the N-series controllers, and the release timeline — so you can find the layer you actually need.

What GR00T WBC is

GR00T Whole-Body Control is NVIDIA's codebase for whole-body controllers of humanoid robots. It hosts model checkpoints and scripts for training, evaluating, and deploying advanced whole-body controllers, and currently supports three things:

Decoupled WBC

The decoupled controller — RL for the lower body, IK for the upper body — used in NVIDIA GR00T N1.5 and N1.6 models.

GEAR-SONIC

The latest generation of generalist humanoid whole-body controllers. See the whitepaper.

MotionBricks

A real-time latent generative model for interactive motion control in animation and robotics — the project page.

Release timeline

DateWhat shipped
2026-04-27MotionBricks preview release — interactive G1 demo, pretrained checkpoints (VQVAE · pose · root), synthetic training code, motion-representation docs, GIF gallery.
2026-05-07GR00T-WBC: end-to-end VLA workflow on G1 (teleop data → Isaac-GR00T N1.7 fine-tune → SONIC deployment).
2026-06-16GR00T-WBC: low-latency teleoperation checkpoint (4-frame lookahead) + Isaac Teleop Setup docs.
2026-07-23GR00T-WBC: SONIC v1.1 checkpoint (robot-heading-normalized, wrist-pose augmentation).

Wording per the official README News section. The MotionBricks full release (complete training pipeline embedded in the GR00T WBC robotics formulation) is tracked in that same roadmap — targeted approximately one month out from the 2026-04-27 preview.

Repository map

The monorepo NVlabs/GR00T-WholeBodyControl is where the pieces live. MotionBricks ships as a subproject (motionbricks/); the SONIC controllers, training, and C++ deployment live under gear_sonic/; docs under docs/source/. The SONIC model selector, VLA workflow, and motion representation pages each dive into one slice.

SONIC models

Default vs Low-latency vs v1.1 — which checkpoint, and the lookahead caveat.

VLA workflow

Collect → fine-tune Isaac-GR00T N1.7 → deploy with SONIC.

Teleoperation

VR, keyboard, gamepad, live camera — and ZMQ streaming.