Does a G1 humanoid on a drive-and-lift base nail a 4x8 sheet faster than a walking G1?

What it found

Takes the 13-stance cover of buildbot-stance (62 nails, reach 0.3 m, 50 N push) and replaces its swept re-stance time with one computed from a drive speed (0.2–1.0 m/s) and a lift speed (0.05–0.5 m/s) plus a 0 or 2 s settle, with the stances visited in the exact shortest order (Held-Karp). The 12 moves cost 5–63 s and the sheet takes 54–121 s (nailing 25 s at a 4 m/s tip, 59 s at 0.5 m/s), against 85–119 s for a walking G1 at 5 s per step and 372 s by hand. Matching the 61 s gantry needs the fast tip, a 0.5 m/s drive and a 0.2 m/s lift; lift speed matters more than drive speed, and settling dominates once the base is quick. Drive, lift and settle are swept, not taken from a chosen machine (a JLG scissor-lift listing is quoted unverified); the G1 reach is carried over unchanged from static statics, with no sway, vibration or base mass, and the stance cover minimises count, not time.

A figure from its own output

Paper, code and results

• README and method
• Experiments and results
• Code
• Tests

More in Robots on the building site

• How slow must a person be at nailing a sheet of sheathing for a Unitree G1 nailing it to pay?How slow must a person be at nailing a sheet of sheathing for a Unitree G1 nailing it to pay? A walking G1 (85 s a sheet) pays above 35 s of person time at 0.3 supervision, a base-mounted one above 26 to 76 s; about $110 a house, and the person's time per sheet is the unsourced unknown.
• Does a nailer's recoil slow a G1 down when it fires a whole 62-nail sheet in sequence?Does a nailer's recoil slow a G1 down when it fires a whole 62-nail sheet in sequence? Not by much: the arm is settled and back on the wall within 0.31 s at 4 N s of recoil, shorter than the 0.16 s moves only for a fast tip, so a sheet loses 0 s (2.3-2.5 s at 10 m/s2 and 4 N s) and the clean-sheet probability does not move; the stud finder still sets the budget (recoil, loop, tip speed and wall are swept, not sourced).
• What can a Unitree G1 or H1 humanoid lift on a house-building site?Can a stock humanoid carry building materials? MuJoCo static payload envelopes of the Unitree G1 (median 4.5 kg, waist-limited; matches Unitree's 2–3 kg rating) and H1 (median 14.2 kg, elbow-limited): the G1 can carry a 2x4 but not a 2x6, the H1 can take one end of an OSB or drywall sheet with a person and set a lightweight block, but not a whole sheet, a normal-weight block or a 60 lb bag, and neither reaches an 8 ft ceiling.
• Does a framing nailer's recoil knock a stock Unitree G1 arm off the stud window?Does a framing nailer's recoil knock a stock Unitree G1 arm off the stud window? In a closed-loop MuJoCo hold, up to 4 N s of recoil moves the tip 1-4 mm (window +-3.9 mm) but 1 N s or more lifts the nosepiece off the wall for 25-140 ms; stiff loops go unstable with 10-20 ms delay (recoil, delay and wall are swept, not sourced).
• How well must a drywall-screwing robot find the framing, and do a few missed screws matter?How well must a drywall-screwing robot find the framing? A 4x8 sheet (28 wall screws, 36 ceiling) needs one read per member good to 1.0 mm for 95% clean sheets, nearly the nailing figure; allowing 3 missed screws gives 1.7 mm, averaging 4 reads 2.1 mm.
• How many hours of an 8-hour shift can a battery-powered Unitree G1 actually work, and does it change whether it pays?How many hours of an 8-hour shift can a battery-powered Unitree G1 work? One 421 Wh pack gives 4.7 h; two packs and one charger give 7.7 h; above about 300 W the charger is the limit, and pack logistics move the cost break-even only from 2.42 to 2.27 to 2.46 (draw swept, not measured).

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Proper scoring & elicitation28Effort & peer prediction9Verification games & slashing19Detection & tolerances14Markets as routers13Prediction-market design9Paying contributors8Decentralised training systems23Digital twins & sim-to-real164LLM chip design loops40Robot manufacturing loops53Ambient AI assistant46Self-replicating manufacturing34Simulation-first design64Engineered clothing45Task-specific AI accelerators40Algorithmic chip-design loops42Open-source purpose-built robots44The software-engineering loop43Adversarial human imitation41Open-source residential construction41Autonomous multi-angle capture34Sensing, imaging and 3D31Energy supply and dense energy storage39Robot societies among people31Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27Laundry-hanging robots25Machine learning on qualitative data23Robots on the building site27Civilizations & group psychology1History & human sciences1

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.