Anyone want to buy a humanoid robot for $16,000? Unitree's newest product hopes you will: Meet the Unitree G1, a 'Humanoid agent AI avatar', also known as a robot. If you haven't heard of Unitree, it's kind of a “budget Chinese option” in the robot space. You will be exposed to company promotional materials barely written in English, but you get some impressive value-for-money robots. You may have seen the Spot knock-off Unitree Go2, a $1,600 robot dog which various resellers are equipped with a flamethrower or just upright military guns.
Unitree's promotional video shows some impressive capabilities for such a cheap robot. He can stand upright independently from a flat-on-the-floor position. Just like the recent one Boston Dynamics Atlas Video, the G1 probably stands up in the strangest way possible. While lying face up on the floor, G1 brings his knees up, places his feet flat on the floor, and then pushes the feet up to form a tripod with the head still on the floor. From there, he uses a limbo-like motion to lean his knees forward, raising his head and torso with all his core strength.
Photo: Unitree
The G1 is a budget robot, so the walking cycle is quite primitive. He walks, stands and 'runs' in a permanent half squat, with his legs forward and his knees constantly bent. The balance looks great though: at one point someone shows up and roughs the robot up a bit, kicking him in the back and punching him in the chest. In either case, it absorbs the abuse with just a few steps back and keeps going.
So, is this humanoid robot… useful? Is it a toy? A major limitation in the real world is the height, only 4 feet tall, which will make many tasks difficult. If you ask the usual question “Can he do the dishes?” asks (assuming the water won't be a problem), you first have to hope he can reach the bottom of the sink. It will be difficult to reach the bottom shelf of a kitchen cabinet. Maybe you can teach him to use a small size to get the price down though. the H1is adult sized, but also costs $90,000.
As for other specs in the confusing and poorly put together spec sheet, it has a 9,000mAh battery that lasts for two hours. The weight is listed as both 35kg and 47kg depending on where you look, so it's somewhere between 77 and 104 pounds. We get real model numbers of components for the vision system: Intel RealSense D435 depth camera and a Livox-MID360 lidar puck. The lidar puck location is interesting. The robot's face is made of clear glass and the head is hollow, except for a 'brain part' at the top of the head. The lidar puck is mounted at the base of the brain and peers through the front of the vision glass to see ahead. Robot design is weird.
The robot can run at a speed of 2 meters per second or 4.4 miles per hour. That's about a slow jog. If “Arm Maximum Load” is on the spec sheet for how much it can lift, it can lift 2kg, or a paltry 4.4 pounds. The joints are all in a range of 160 to 310 degrees. You'll need to do a lot of programming to get this to do anything useful, but Unitree isn't very forthcoming about how to do that. Presumably you'll use the same thing Unitree SDK use the robot dogs. You can also browse around there documentation for developers for the Unitree H1 to get an idea of what to expect.