How slow must a person be at nailing a sheet of sheathing for a Unitree G1 nailing it to pay?

What it found

Turns the question of buildbot-grounded around: the robot's time per 62-nail sheet is now simulated (buildbot-mobilebase: 54 to 121 s on a drive-and-lift base, 85 s walking at 5 s a step), the person's is not sourced, so this solves for the person time above which a G1 saves money at a $37.86 loaded hour. A walking G1 pays above 35 s a sheet at 0.3 supervision hours per robot-hour (18 s at 0.1, 94 s at 1.0); a base needs 26 to 76 s at 0.3. The taskbook’s assumed 372 s is far above these, but a pro who nails a sheet in about a minute would not be beaten on cost. The dollars are about $110 a house on 32 wall sheets. Not sourced: the person time (no crew-productivity figure was found), the base price, and the supervision and use ranges, which are swept. Simulated robot times are an upper-bound reach model.

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

• 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).
• Can the building-site robot skills be packaged as loadable files, and does training on two plants at once cover a third?Can the building-site robot skills ship as loadable files? Five JSON skill files reload and re-score exactly; a follow skill tuned on the worse of two plants passes 68%, 65% and 70% on the rigid, flexing and MuJoCo plants, no better than tuning on the flexing plant alone (72%, 69%, 71%).

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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.