Can a stock Unitree G1 or H1 humanoid push a nailer into a wall and place nails inside a stud face?

research/buildbot-fasten

Can a stock Unitree G1 or H1 push a nailer into a wall and place nails inside a stud face? One 4x8 sheet is 62 nails, 34 with a +-3.9 mm window; the tip needs 1.24 mm scatter for a 95% sheet. The G1 pushes up to 142 N and reaches 18 of 62 nails from one stance, the H1 up to 276 N and 36 of 62 (static, peak torque, no policy).

7 tests

What it found

The nailing schedule of one 4x8 sheet (62 nails; 34 joint nails have a ±3.9 mm window from the 3/8 in edge distance on a 1.5 in stud face), the largest wall push the simulated Menagerie G1 and H1 can make, and the joint error the windows allow. A whole sheet needs a tip scatter of at most 1.24 mm for 95%; the arm kinematics turn 1° of independent joint error into 10–24 mm, so joints need 0.05–0.11°, which 11-bit sensors meet in the model (no backlash or compliance). The G1 pushes 8–142 N (wrist and waist limited) and covers 18 of 62 nails from one stance; the H1 pushes 82–276 N (elbow limited), 36 of 62. Not sourced: the push needed to seat a nailer (swept 20–100 N), friction (swept), any Unitree repeatability; the edge distance and nail size come from secondary sources. No policy trained, no recoil modelled; static, peak torque.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/buildbot-fasten: figure — buildbot-fasten/experiments/figure.png, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

More in Robots on the building site

Can a G1 humanoid nail a 4x8 sheet lying flat on a table?Can a G1 humanoid nail a 4x8 sheet lying flat on a table? Not better than on a wall: pushing down at 50 N with its feet planted it holds only 30 of 693 reach cells, reaching 48 of the sheet's 62 nails in 16 stances (13 stances for all 62 on a wall), and matching hand nailing (372 s) only if each re-stance takes under 23-24 s (push, standoff and re-stance time are swept, not sourced; static IK, no walking).
With the simulated carry and nailing results in place of a swept slowdown, does a stock humanoid pay on a house site?With simulated carry and nailing results in place of a swept slowdown, does a stock humanoid pay on a house site? The H1's carry slowdown is 0.41 to 1.70 against a one-stud labourer (pays in 72% of cells) and 1.63 to 6.82 against a bundle carrier (never pays), against a break-even of 1.07; the dollars are tens per house.
How long can a Unitree G1 hold a building load before its motors overheat?Can a stock humanoid hold a stud for a minute? G1 static joint torques re-read against a swept continuous-torque fraction: the waist is at 0.54 of peak with empty hands at the carry pose and 0.91 with a 3.8 kg stud, so below a 0.6 continuous ratio nothing is sustainable (0.6 kg at 0.6) and a stud reaches the winding limit in 0.14 thermal time constants at 1/3. A 150-pose search finds a posture (hands 0.15 m ahead, 0.7 m high) at 0.33 of peak, so the 0.91 is not the floor.
Does a searched posture let a Unitree G1 hold a stud longer than the default pose?Does a searched arm and waist posture let a G1 hold a stud longer? In MuJoCo the stud's peak joint fraction falls from 0.91 (default) to 0.76 with the centre of pressure on the sole point and to 0.49 (best of three noisy seeds) 3 cm inside the toe edge, enough to make a stud sustainable at a continuous rating of 0.5 of peak; a 2x6 goes 0.93 to 0.68 and sheets stay above peak.
Does a hand-written flexing-sheet plant agree with MuJoCo, and do its sim-to-sim transfer failures hold there?Does the hand-written flexing-sheet plant of buildbot-skills agree with MuJoCo? Pass/fail labels agree on 99.8% of 2600 episodes across 13 policies, so the sim-to-sim transfer failure (0-11% vs 81% where tuned) is not an artefact of my equations.
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.