Hardware

Z1 Arm (Unitree Z1)

The Z1 arm is a lightweight 6-DOF manipulator from Unitree Robotics with a payload of a few kilograms, integrated joint motors with torque control, and a weight low enough to mount on Unitree's quadrupeds. It is used both as a standalone low-cost research arm and as the manipulation payload in legged mobile manipulation, where arm and base are increasingly controlled by a single whole-body policy.

Why it matters for physical AI

Affordable torque-controllable arms that ride on legged bases opened up loco-manipulation research, where reinforcement-learned whole-body controllers coordinate locomotion and reaching as one problem rather than two stacked systems.