What can a Unitree G1 or H1 humanoid lift on a house-building site?

What it found

Whole-body static payload envelopes of the MuJoCo Menagerie Unitree G1 and H1: feet fixed, the combined centre of mass of robot and load kept over the feet, every joint inside its peak torque limit, and the load bisected at each hand height and reach. The G1 holds a median 4.5 kg in its palms (1.5–4.7 kg at 0.4–0.5 m forward, up to 12 kg close in), in line with Unitree's 2–3 kg arm rating, and its 50 N·m waist pitch is the usual limit. The H1 holds a median 14.2 kg, limited by its 18 N·m elbows. On nine residential tasks the G1 can carry a 2x4 and hold a nailer but not a 2x6. The H1 can take one end of a 4x8 OSB or drywall sheet with a person and set a lightweight concrete block, but not a whole sheet, a normal-weight block or a 60 lb bag, and neither reaches an 8 ft ceiling. Task masses are sourced (USG, NDS, a CMU survey, a nailer listing), and OSB is swept over 45–51 lb. Static only, at peak torque, with a pose that is not torque-optimal; not a rated payload.

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 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%).
• Does a sheet-following robot skill trained on a rigid-sheet simulator survive a flexing sheet, sensing delay and actuator lag?Does a sheet-following skill tuned on a rigid-sheet simulator survive a flexing sheet with delay? It passes 81% of episodes where it was tuned and 0-11% on the held-out plant; tuning on the held-out plant gives 61-66% there.
• How many times must a G1 humanoid re-stand to nail one 4x8 sheet of sheathing?How many times must a G1 humanoid re-stand to nail one 4x8 sheet? About 13 stances at 5 platform heights: with its feet planted it holds a 3.4 kg nailer at 50 N only 0.7-1.5 m high and 0.3 m sideways, so one stance covers at best 6 of 62 nails, and the sheet matches hand nailing (372 s) only if each re-stance takes under 26-29 s (push to seat and re-stance time are swept, not sourced; no walking simulated).

All 27 Robots on the building site projects →

Other research topics

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.