If you’ve been tinkering with robotics and harbour a burning desire to bag your very own humanoid, then listen up. REVEL and NVIDIA Corporation have officially kicked off registrations for what they’re boldly dubbing the “world’s largest Physical AI Hackathon.” With a prize pot north of $100,000, the organisers are dangling some seriously tempting kit, including, get this, an actual humanoid robot as the grand prize. Because, let’s be honest, who needs a fancy coffee machine when you could have a bipedal companion to fetch it for you?
The multi-month event, spanning from December 15, 2025, right through to the end of February 2026, is shrewdly structured to reel in talent from every corner of the robotics universe. With Pro, Amateur, and Junior tracks, everyone from grizzled industry veterans to enthusiastic high school clubs can throw their hat in the ring. The entire competition is built on NVIDIA’s formidable robotics stack, with challenges designed to be tackled first in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, a simulation platform built on Omniverse, before the real-world acid test. The challenges will cover everything from intricate manipulation and razor-sharp perception to the esoteric art of “agentic control.” And, in a rather smashing nod to future generations, it’ll even feature modular tasks from The LEGO Group and LEGO Education – presumably to make sure the next wave of roboticists can tell their bricks from their separators.
Beyond the headline-grabbing humanoid, the prize list is a robotics boffin’s absolute dream. Top winners can expect to bag themselves some rather juicy RTX 6000 Blackwell GPUs, shiny Jetson Thor developer kits, and a veritable smorgasbord of robotic manipulators. The winning teams will also be flown over to San Jose, California, for a swanky prize ceremony just before NVIDIA’s GTC conference in March 2026. The stated goal is to “train the workforce that never sleeps,” which, let’s face it, is a comfortingly dystopian way of saying they’re building a relentless talent pipeline.
Why is this important?
This isn’t just another run-of-the-mill coding contest; it’s a shrewd, strategic ecosystem play by NVIDIA. By centering the hackathon on its Omniverse and Isaac Sim platforms, NVIDIA is expertly ingraining its tools with the next generation of robotics talent, from fresh-faced students to seasoned pros. The “simulation first” approach perfectly underpins the industry’s seismic shift towards harnessing digital twins to de-risk, accelerate, and trim the fat off robotics development costs. It’s a colossal, gamified recruitment and training exercise, meticulously crafted to cement its software and hardware as the undisputed gold standard for the future of physical AI. A veritable Robohorizon Robot King move, if you ask me.
