[elil17]

To be fair to BD, Atlas can lift 50 kg and a Unitree G1 can lift about 2 kg. An Atlas could literally pick up and throw a G1.

They are very different robots with very different goals, so it should be no surprise that the G1 appears much more agile.

[d--b]

Yeah, when the G1s dance with kids, I realized how small they actually were. Definitely not the same category.

[verdverm]

The H2 is what everyone is talking about now

some specs here: https://www.unitree.com/H2

claimed 3h battery life, can hold about 10% of its weight (7kg, with arms)

[alex43578]

So Atlas can lift 7x the capacity. Even Digit, the tote-consolidating robot, can do 35lbs.

Unitree's demos are a lot of fun, and the antics of releasing the G1 to the public has certainly captured people's attention, but a "working" robot won't look, act, or develop from the G1 or even H2.

[dash2]

Isn’t it easier to make an agile robot big than to make a big robot agile?

[chmod775]

One big issue is the "joints". It's always a trade-off between mass, strength, speed, precision, and dexterity. State of the art is matching or exceeding organic joints on 2-3 axis, while being an order of magnitude below human/animal performance on the two other axis.

Human individual fingers can withstand internal loads of hundreds of newtons, (possibly a thousand for brief periods if you're a star rock-climber), while at the same being capable of tasks such as writing, which require high speeds and (sub-)millimeter precision, while also enjoying 4 degrees of freedom (5 for the thumb), and they're stuffed full of sensory organs to boot. Oh and they're also self-healing, so taking some damage during use is no problem and they will actually adapt to the task they're used for over time. Everything we can make compared to this is laughably primitive.

If you make an agile robot big, it now weighs more, which means its joints now need to handle greater loads, which makes it necessary to make them much bulkier and heavier.

A lot of this is just inherent limitations of electric motors and having to convert rotational energy. This gets heavy fast.

Decent synthetic electrically-driven muscle fibers would go a long way.