Robotics Takes Over Downtown Austin at CoRL 2026: a 21-Joint Robotic Hand Debuts, and NVIDIA Demos GR00T 2
The Conference on Robot Learning is meeting at 110 East 2nd Street through Wednesday, where exhibitors are showing dexterous hands, teleoperated robots and a new NVIDIA model that transfers human hand movements to machines.
AUSTIN — The robots are downtown this week. At the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2026), meeting at 110 East 2nd Street, GENTO — the embodied-robotics brand of Tianji Intelligence — is publicly unveiling a dexterous robotic hand with 21 degrees of freedom, the company announced Tuesday: five active degrees of freedom in the thumb and four in each other finger, in a 750-gram prototype the company rates at 10 newtons of fingertip force, a half-second open-and-close time and repeat positioning accuracy of ±0.05 millimeters.
The same conference is hosting one of the week's headline keynotes. NVIDIA's Jim Fan introduced GR00T 2, which the company describes as a world action model that predicts future video frames and robot actions together and can transfer skills learned from human demonstrations to robots. In one demonstration, researchers recorded human hand movements with a wearable exoskeleton, and GR00T 2 then ran on Marvin Pro — a fixed-base, dual-arm platform custom-built for NVIDIA by Tianji — performing two-handed tasks such as preparing banana yogurt, according to the exhibitor's account.
On the show floor, GENTO's Luna robot follows an operator's movements and hands objects to visitors in a teleoperation demonstration, while Marvin Pro selects and grasps objects in response to spoken English instructions. All of the performance figures in this file are the exhibitor's own specifications, not independently tested results. CoRL's main conference runs November 9–11 with workshops on November 12; the exhibit floor's final session is Wednesday, November 11, from 8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Austin time.
