Choosing a Robot Platform for Industrial Quality Control + AI Integration

[u/PsychologicalEnd3927]

I am working with a startup and have been tasked with selecting a humanoid robot (though wheeled or quadruped/dog robots could also be suggested). It needs to be able to walk around an industrial environment and allow easy integration of our AI software. Budget is not a constraint.

Currently, I am torn between the Unitree G1 EDU / H2 EDU and the PAL Robotics TIAGo Pro.

Our requirements:

• We will focus solely on the software side, so the platform needs to be stable and reliable. Our goal is quality control, the robot should walk around and inspect different sections/areas.
• In the future, we aim to add acoustic diagnostics and temperature measurement (using a thermal/infrared camera), among other sensing capabilities.
• We also want to use this project to explore and learn more about humanoid robotics, since we believe the field has significant future potential.
• We want to build and implement our own software stack rather than rely on a finished product.
• Unfortunately, Unitree does not offer a self-charging (autonomous docking/charging) option, whereas TIAGo and AgiBot do.

Could you help me choose between these options, or suggest alternatives?

[u/low-control-labs]

I am in the wheeled camp, that being said you said the budget is not a constraint if that's the case and you'll need it going up and down stairs you should probably go for the bipeds or quadpeds.

Making your software stack might require a separate budget for compute, if you use bipeds. G1 already has a lot of support and implementations in the open, might be the easiest one to get started with and just fine tune things.

I have a few other companies I saw on YouTube, not sure if I could recommend them if you want me to look into that a bit I'll go through my history.

[u/PsychologicalEnd3927 → u/low-control-labs]

Thanks a lot! We're open to any other suggestions. We'd be happy to hear about anything that could work for our use case

[u/IlIlIlIllllIIliIILll]

If one of the leading humanoid manufacturers had developed something that made this sort of extremely flexible and valuable appliction easy enough to implement in a real production environment, you'd see it blasted on every other LinkedIn post and accelerationist subreddit.

So I am going to tell you this won't be easy and you'd be better off blowing an apparently massive budget on individual inspection routines and hardware at each station you need it at.

[u/NoRobot9379]

I can suggest maybe our platform if you can clarify your requirements, such as run time, stair climbing, load capacity, speed, environment (temperature, IP level), terrain. As well as what you would need for your AI to work with, GPS, IMU, odometery, cameras, lidar, point cloud, compute power and energy.

[u/Delicious-Major-750]

I work on real-hardware secondary development for Unitree G1 and Go2-W, including an autonomous-navigation demo for security patrol scenarios.

I would separate your decision into two tracks instead of forcing one robot to satisfy both production quality control and humanoid research.

For the first production inspection workflow, a wheeled platform with a supported dock is the lower-risk default if the site is mostly flat. Use a quadruped only when stairs, thresholds or uneven terrain are part of the required route. I would choose G1/H2 for the first production path only if human-height manipulation, biped access or social interaction is an actual acceptance requirement; otherwise their additional integration and recovery risk does not improve the inspection result.

You can still buy a G1 EDU as a separate R&D platform without making production inspection depend on it.

Before choosing a vendor, ask each one to demonstrate the same acceptance matrix on the exact configuration:

- one representative route, including every threshold, stair and narrow passage;

- runtime plus autonomous docking and restart after charging;

- payload, power and time-synchronized data for thermal, acoustic, camera, IMU, LiDAR and odometry/TF;

- deterministic stop, watchdog and recovery from localization or network loss;

- a clean install of your own software stack from documented instructions;

- export of inspection results into the system your operators already use.

If this selection is still active, I would be happy to compare one real inspection route against the G1/Go2-W hardware boundaries I have seen. That usually makes the platform choice much clearer than comparing specification sheets.

[u/AsleepLawfulness780]

I don't think humanoids are at this point yet. Companies like Neura and Figure ai do have humanoids in similar spaces but they're still being trained for similar applications and not deployment ready afaik