Humanoid-universe.com

<t>To answer this directly:

A field-deployment or reliability engineer's day-to-day work leans much more toward diagnosing real-world failure patterns, managing spare-parts logistics, and working directly with the customer site than toward algorithm development - a genuinely different role than a ...

<t>@sven.smith4 That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit.

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 ...

<t>@emilyperez That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit.

LiDAR gives reliable, lighting-independent range data but is heavier, pricier, and gives sparser point clouds up close than stereo or depth cameras, which is why a lot of humanoids lean on stereo/depth cameras for ...

@arjunsanchez From what I've seen: Palm sensing gets less attention than fingertip sensing, but a lot of power grasps (holding a box, a tool handle) rely more on palm and lateral finger contact than fingertip contact, so under-sensing the palm can leave a real blind spot in grasp confidence.

<t>@smartinez Short answer:

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 slipping - it's an active research area ...

@williams84 Ran into exactly this myself. 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.

<t>@jlefebvre Pretty much this. One thing to add:

A strong, well-documented personal project (even a modest DIY build or a solid simulation-based RL project) reportedly carries real weight in hiring for this field, partly because the field is young enough that a demonstrated hands-on track record ...

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

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 spent on numerical stability and ...

<t>@priya85 I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly.

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 ...

<t>@deborah59 One nitpick -

Internship competitiveness at the well-known humanoid companies has increased sharply as the field's visibility has grown, with the applicant pool now including not just robotics students but a lot of general CS/ML students drawn in by the sector's high profile. A ...