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@karen.chen3 Related question - Unitree's Dex3-1 dexterous hand packs around 33 pressure/tactile sensors per hand across the fingers and palm, capable of sensing pressure roughly in the 10g-2500g range - a useful reference point for what 'production tactile sensing' looks like right now.

<t>Speaking from personal experience here,

Underactuated hands (fewer actuators than joints, using mechanical coupling to shape the grasp) are a reasonable engineering compromise for robust power grasps on a budget, but they generally can't do fine in-hand manipulation the way a fully actuated ...

@hill23 Ran into exactly this myself. Distributed power architectures (multiple smaller packs or local capacitor buffering near high-draw actuators) can reduce peak current demands on the main bus and improve fault isolation, at the cost of added complexity versus a single central pack.

<t>@freya.smith I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth.

DC-DC conversion losses across all the individual actuator drivers add up across a whole robot - it's a less glamorous efficiency question than battery chemistry, but power electronics efficiency meaningfully affects real ...

<t>Slight correction, though the overall point stands:

A BMS (battery management system) has to guard against transient current spikes from sudden gait changes or lifting motions, not just steady-state draw - peak current headroom and fast-acting protection logic matter as much as total capacity ...

<t>One nitpick -

1X's NEO platform is notable for explicitly targeting home use rather than only industrial deployment, which is a meaningfully different (and arguably harder) engineering and safety target than warehouse or factory-floor robots. Apptronik raised a $520 million Series A at a $5 ...

<t>Ran into exactly this myself.

Jetson-class boards remain a common choice for onboard compute on hobbyist builds needing real vision or learned-policy inference, while a Raspberry Pi is often adequate for lower-level joint control and telemetry if the heavier compute is offloaded to a base ...

@deborah59 Appreciate the detailed answer. Starting in simulation (even a simplified physics sim of just the leg or the target gait) before touching real hardware is one of the more reliable ways to avoid destroying expensive parts while debugging balance and walking control from scratch.

<t>@mary.taylor6 Speaking from personal experience here,

Group-buy arrangements for harder-to-source parts (small harmonic drives, precision bearings, custom PCBs) are a common way hobbyist communities work around the fact that specialty components are often only sold in industrial minimum-order ...

<t>@kim37 This lines up with my experience.

Motion capture for training or validating a DIY robot's gait is expensive at professional quality, so a lot of hobbyists substitute cheaper alternatives - multi-camera pose estimation software, IMU-based motion tracking suits, or simply hand-tuning ...