GOLEM Maps Battery Disassembly Gaps

By Sophia ChenAUG 25, 20261 min read

Single-source brief: arXiv reports a modular humanoid system for EV battery pack disassembly, but deployment remains unconfirmed.

What Changed

The GOLEM team presented an open-source system for EV battery disassembly.

The system uses Unitree’s H1-2 humanoid robot, according to arXiv.

GOLEM separates walking, arm work, balance, navigation, and spatial memory into independent modules.

Those modules use shared interfaces. The design lets developers swap and compare methods.

The software runs as a Docker-based ROS 2 setup. It also links MuJoCo and IsaacLab digital twins to the physical robot.

The paper frames battery pack teardown as dull and dangerous work. It says humans perform almost all of it today.

GOLEM’s tests show why full task deployment remains hard.

Its LiDAR-inertial navigation placed the robot within 13.0 centimeters of a six-meter goal.

A learned standing controller recovered from outside disturbances. The authors say a sampling-based lower-body MPC did not.

Fastener grasping showed a larger drop under real operating limits.

The reported success rate was 97% while tethered. It fell to 87% while free-standing.

It dropped to 37% when navigation caused pose variation.

This is a development and demonstration system, not a confirmed production deployment.

The reported results cover one battery pack task: grasping loosened fasteners from a Hyundai Ioniq 5 pack.

Unknowns include task speed, safety process, uptime, and performance across varied pack designs.

No independent confirmation was supplied.