Unitree G1 specs, decoded. Offbrand Human

The published Unitree G1 specs run to about thirty rows. Four of them tell you what the machine is: 1,320 mm tall, about 35 kg, 23 joints, about 2 hours of battery. Two more tell you what it is for, and they get skipped almost every time: the warranty row reads 8 months, and the secondary-development row on the base model is a slash, meaning you are not allowed to program it.

Every figure below comes from Unitree's G1 page and its store listing.

The sheet, beside its rivals

Machine	Standing height	Weight	Total DOF	Stated runtime	Price
Unitree G1	1,320 mm	about 35 kg	23	about 2 h	$13,500
Unitree G1 EDU	1,320 mm	about 35 kg and up	23 to 43	about 2 h	contact sales
Unitree R1	1,230 mm	about 29 kg	26	about 1 h	$4,900 store, $5,900 on the spec page
Booster T1	1,180 mm	about 30 kg	23 (41 with dexterous hands)	2 h walking, 4 h standing	quote only
1X NEO	5 ft 6 in (about 1,676 mm)	66 lb (about 30 kg)	75	4 h	$20,000 or $499/mo

Sources: unitree.com/g1, unitree.com/R1, booster.tech and 1x.tech/neo; NEO's price comes from 1x.tech's order page.

The R1's two prices are not a typo, and the R1 page explains the gap.

1,320 mm, and the 690 mm underneath it

Standing, the G1 measures 1,320 x 450 x 200 mm, which is 4 feet 4 inches, ninety millimetres over the R1 and a good 350 mm under NEO.

The row below explains the design. Folded, the G1 is 690 x 450 x 300 mm, roughly knee height, and two people can lift that shape into a car. Robots sold as home helpers are built to stand in your house. This one is built to travel to a demo or a lab bench, and the geometry says so before any marketing copy does.

Two rows set the working envelope: calf plus thigh is 0.6 m, and arm span reads "about 0.45 M". With the shoulders only 450 mm apart, that has to mean one arm's reach rather than fingertip to fingertip. A 0.45 m arm on a 1.32 m body works at table height. High shelves are out of range.

About 35 kg, and the sentence printed next to it

Thirty-five kilograms is 77 pounds, nearly all of it motors, gearboxes and battery, so it is dense rather than bulky. Unitree pairs that mass with a plain instruction on the same page: keep "a sufficient safe distance between the humanoid robot and people."

Set that against NEO's sheet, which is 350 mm taller at 30 kg and publishes a head injury criterion below 250, an audible noise figure of 22 dB, "no pinchpoints," and 95 percent backdrivability. Backdrivable means you can push a limb and it moves instead of fighting you.

Those two sheets answer different questions. The mass row does not tell you which robot belongs near a person. The safety rows do.

23 degrees of freedom, and the 20 you can add

A degree of freedom is one independently driven joint. The G1's 23 break down as six per leg, five per arm, and one at the waist. Twelve, ten, one.

Note the zeros. No joints in the head, none in the wrists, and the single-hand row for the base G1 is a slash. The store page still advertises "force-controlled dexterous hands," while the spec table lists that three-fingered hand as an EDU option. Both pages are Unitree's, and the table is the one to believe.

The EDU jump from 23 to 43 is exactly this arithmetic:

2 extra waist joints (giving the torso pitch and roll on top of yaw)
2 extra wrist joints per arm, which is 4
a 7 DOF three-fingered force-control hand per arm, which is 14

Twenty added joints, eighteen of them at the ends of the arms. That is the shape of the whole industry in one row: legs are solved enough to be standard equipment, and hands remain an upgrade you negotiate over email. Hands stay the hard part at every maker, and the parts inside a joint are covered in arms, legs and actuators.

Stacked bar breaking the Unitree G1 EDU's 43 degrees of freedom into six parts: 12 in the legs at six per leg, 10 in the arms at five per arm and 1 at the waist, which is the base robot's 23, then the EDU options adding 2 more waist joints, 4 wrist joints at two per arm, and 14 hand joints from a seven DOF three-fingered force-control hand per arm, so 18 of the 20 added joints sit at the ends of the arms.

About 2 hours, and the arithmetic Unitree leaves out

The pack appears twice: "13 string lithium battery" under power supply, and a quick-release 9000mAh smart battery in accessories. Milliamp hours alone describe nothing, because energy is capacity times voltage. Thirteen lithium cells in series sit near 48 V nominal and 54.6 V full, confirmed by the 54V 5A charger row.

So 9 Ah at roughly 48 V is about 430 Wh, and 430 Wh across the stated 2 hours is an average draw near 215 W.

Munro and Associates with a base G1 in the studio, reading off the same rows as this post: 4 ft 4 in, 35 kg, about 23 degrees of freedom, and a 9,000 mAh pack on a 46 to 48 volt system that they put at roughly half a kilowatt hour. That is the 430 Wh derived above, arrived at by engineers holding the robot.

Run the same sum on NEO: 842 Wh over a stated 4 hours is about 210 W. A 30 kg tendon-driven machine and a 35 kg geared one land within a few watts of each other.

Charge time is the figure nobody prints. A 54 V, 5 A charger delivers at most 270 W, so a flat 430 Wh pack needs over an hour and a half, and real charge curves taper near the top. The accessories row holds the fix: the battery is quick release, so a second pack turns that wait into a swap. Budget for one.

Booster's T1 quotes 10.5 Ah with no voltage published, so it cannot be converted at all. Amp hours without volts is a number, not a spec.

Three number cards comparing battery figures: the Unitree G1's derived 430 Wh, from 9,000 mAh at 13 cells in series near 48 V nominal, which is about 215 W across the stated 2 hours on a charger that tops out at 270 W; the 1X NEO's published 842 Wh over a stated 4 hours, about 210 W; and the Booster T1's 10.5 Ah, which cannot be converted to watt hours because no pack voltage is published, with 2 hours walking and 4 hours standing stated.

90 newton metres, 165 degrees, and the joint hardware rows

Knee torque is 90 N.m standard, 120 N.m on the EDU, against 130 N.m maximum peak on the Booster T1. Ninety newton metres is roughly the effort of holding a 9 kg weight on the end of a one metre bar, continuously, which is a knee's whole job.

Arm maximum load is about 2 kg, 3 kg on the EDU. A full kettle, once, in one hand. The joint ranges are generous in a way human joints are not (knee 0 to 165 degrees, waist yaw plus or minus 155 degrees), which is how the robot folds in half.

Four rows separate a serious joint from a hobby servo: crossed roller bearings, low-inertia permanent-magnet synchronous motors, dual encoders (one before the gearbox and one after, so the controller knows the true output angle even as the gear winds up under load), and hollow electrical routing, so cables run inside the joint rather than snagging outside it. Cooling is local air, and the thermal ceiling on sustained torque is not published.

The blank rows tell you the most

Absences, all checked on the page:

No walking speed. Nowhere on the table. For a bipedal robot, that omission is loud.
No whole-robot payload, only an arm load. Nothing states what the G1 can carry while walking.
No repeatability figure. NEO publishes 0.1 mm repetition and 1 mm positional accuracy. Silence here is itself a spec.
No IP rating, no noise level, no charge time.
Warranty: 8 months on the base machine, 18 on the EDU. On a $13,500 robot with no described US service network, that is the row I would read first.
Basic computing: an 8-core CPU. The high-computing-power module (Orin class) is an EDU accessory. Booster ships an Nvidia AGX Orin at 200 TOPS in the T1's base specification.
Secondary development: a slash. The base G1 does not support it, so everything the robot does is what Unitree shipped.

That last pair reframes the sheet. A base G1 is a demonstration platform with a fixed behaviour set, and the version you can develop on is priced by email.

Three rows to read first on any humanoid sheet

Where the joints live, not the headline count. Twelve in the legs is standard; everything above the waist is the product decision.
Watt-hours, not milliamp hours. If the voltage is missing, ask why.
Warranty and safety language. Eight months and "keep a safe distance" describe a different buyer than a published head injury criterion does.

By that reading the G1 describes itself accurately: excellent hardware, sold plainly as equipment. What the $13,500 has done over two years is charted in the price history, and if those rows put you off at this price, the same caveats apply to the cheaper Unitree R1.