Humanoid-universe.com

@george92 I'd push back on this a bit. Boston Dynamics' commercial electric Atlas switched fully from hydraulic to QDD-style electric actuation, ending up quieter and lighter with comparable or better dynamic performance than the old hydraulic platform.

<t>I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models like RT-2, OpenVLA, and Physical Intelligence's pi0 unify a vision-language backbone with an action-output head, letting a robot map a camera image and a text instruction ...

<t>@sven.wilson4 I'd frame this differently.

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 for real ...

<t>Minor factual note:

Sourcing small, precise harmonic drives as an individual hobbyist is genuinely difficult - most manufacturers focus on industrial customers with large order volumes, which is why a fair number of DIY builds substitute cycloidal drives, planetary gearboxes, or belt-reduction ...

<t>I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly.

A realistic hobbyist bill-of-materials for a small biped balloons fast once you add a real IMU, decent motor controllers, a reasonable battery/BMS setup, and enough compute for onboard control - the headline '$5k' budget assumes a ...

<t>From hands-on experience,

This hype cycle differs from earlier robotics hype waves mainly in having real, verifiable revenue-generating deployments (BMW's Figure line, Amazon's Digit units) alongside the speculative funding activity - previous waves were almost entirely research-and-demo-stage ...

<t>Not to derail, but this reminds me of something adjacent:

Isaac Lab (the successor to Isaac Gym) is widely used for large-scale parallel RL training thanks to GPU-accelerated physics, while MuJoCo is often used as a secondary 'sim-to-sim' validation step because its contact dynamics are ...

<t>I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly.

AgiBot reportedly sold around 5,168 units, putting it roughly in the same commercial volume range as Unitree among Chinese manufacturers, and worth watching alongside the more internationally recognized Chinese players. Fourier ...

<t>Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here.

Apptronik raised a $520 million Series A at a $5 billion valuation (bringing total funding to roughly $935 million), with its Apollo humanoid reportedly being tested by Mercedes-Benz - a notable data point for how much capital a ...

<t>@betty.king I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified.

Estimated total operational commercial humanoids worldwide sit around 7,000-8,000 units as of mid-2026, broken down roughly as Optimus Gen 3 (1,000+), Unitree (5,500+ cumulative), Agility Digit (~250 ...