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

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. Anti ...

One nitpick - Motor cogging torque (the 'notchy' feel from magnet-to-slot interactions) shows up as small periodic torque ripple that can translate into visible joint jitter at low speeds - it's usually mitigated with skewed magnets, better current control, or software compensation tables.

<t>One nitpick -

Latency between a perceived event (like a slip) and a corrective control response matters enormously for balance - even 50-100ms of extra perception latency can be the difference between a smooth recovery and a fall, which is part of why a lot of balance-critical sensing is ...

@ethan17 Agreed, and I'd add: 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>@garcia51 Just to be precise about one thing:

Tendon-driven fingers let you move the heavier actuators back into the palm or forearm, keeping the fingers themselves light and fast, but they introduce cable routing, tensioning, and long-term wear problems that direct-actuated fingers don't have ...

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

In-hand reorientation (repositioning a grasped object without setting it down) is one of the more advanced manipulation skills, requiring either a highly dexterous hand with enough DoF or clever use of gravity and controlled ...

I'd frame this differently. Figure's fourth-generation Dexterous Hand (on Figure 02/03) reportedly offers 16 degrees of freedom per hand with sensors integrated into each finger, aimed at fine force control tasks like handling small electronic components without crushing them.

<t>Slightly off-topic, but related:

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 ...

<t>@scott21 Slight correction, though the overall point stands:

A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time ...

<t>@giulia.roberts4 Agreed, and I'd add:

24/7 factory-pilot support roles (the engineers keeping a deployed fleet running through real shifts) reportedly carry a real burnout risk, since they combine the unpredictability of early-stage hardware with the operational pressure of a live production ...