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<t>@diego.moore6 Ran into exactly this myself.

Companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are reportedly pulling senior ROS, controls, and learning engineers directly out of warehouse-automation and industrial-robotics roles - a sign of real talent competition between adjacent ...

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

A lot of the current wave genuinely is repackaged 2000s and 2010s research (ZMP walking, whole-body control, DARPA-era grasping) combined with two things that weren't available then: cheap high-torque-density actuators and large-scale ...

<t>@emily45 This matches what I've seen too.

Backdrivability is the property that lets an external force move a joint without destroying the gearbox or the motor - it's central to both safe human-robot contact and to letting a leg comply naturally when the robot stumbles. Encoder resolution ...

@pierregreen From hands-on experience, A lot of the per-joint cost in a modern actuator isn't the motor - it's the combination of a precision gearbox, integrated encoders, torque sensing, and the driver electronics, all of which have to fit inside a housing the size of a fist.

<t>Tangent, but worth mentioning:

Sensor fusion mostly earns its keep by covering for each individual sensor's weaknesses - vision struggles with occlusion and lighting, IMUs drift, force/torque sensors are noisy at low loads - fusing them gives a more robust estimate than any one source alone ...

<t>Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting:

ROS2 remains common in research and early-stage products for its tooling and ecosystem, but a number of production humanoid companies run custom, more tightly-optimized middleware for their real-time control loops, using ROS2-like tooling mainly ...

<t>Thanks for laying this out, genuinely useful.

Whole-body control (WBC) formulates locomotion and manipulation as a single optimization problem across all joints simultaneously, respecting contact constraints and task priorities - it's more general than ZMP-only approaches but is ...

@timothy.roberts2 I dealt with almost this exact situation. Wet, oily, or otherwise low-friction objects are still a genuine edge case for most current hands, since tactile sensing and grasp-force controllers are typically tuned and validated on dry, higher-friction test objects.

<t>Tangent, but worth mentioning:

Solid-state battery claims from platforms like XPeng's IRON, GAC's GoMate, and EngineAI's T800 are genuinely promising on paper for energy density and safety margins, but independent, large-scale field validation of those runtime claims is still fairly limited as ...

<t>@harmonicjen60 This lines up with my experience.

Companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are reportedly pulling senior ROS, controls, and learning engineers directly out of warehouse-automation and industrial-robotics roles - a sign of real talent competition between ...