Humanoid-universe.com

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

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>@deborahperez I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly.

It's common for a single humanoid to mix actuator types by joint - harmonic drives or hybrid geared actuators at the hips and shoulders where sustained torque matters most, and lower-ratio QDD-style actuators at ankles ...

<t>@servobre20 I dealt with almost this exact situation.

Harmonic drives use high reduction ratios (often around 100:1), which gives excellent force density, stiffness, and thermal endurance for continuous-duty lifting - the tradeoff is low backdrivability and some backlash.

Makes me wonder ...

<t>Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it:

Event cameras (which report per-pixel brightness changes rather than full frames) are still more of a research curiosity than a production sensor for humanoids, mainly because the software ecosystem and processing pipelines around them are far ...

<t>Can I ask a dumb follow-up -

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. Palm sensing ...

@priya85 Agreed, and I'd add: Grasp planning for deformable or non-rigid objects (bags, cables, cloth) remains one of the genuinely unsolved problems in manipulation - rigid-body grasp models simply don't capture how the object will behave once contact starts.

<t>@benjaminsanchez I can speak to this a bit.

The average humanoid in 2026 carries under 2.5 kWh of battery capacity, with real-world runtimes clustering between two and four hours depending on how dynamic the workload is - static, low-motion tasks stretch runtime much further than continuous ...

<t>@mary.taylor6 I can speak to this a bit.

Battery placement (torso-centered vs backpack vs distributed through the limbs) is a real tradeoff between center-of-mass/balance considerations and thermal/cooling access - a torso-centered pack helps balance but is harder to cool than a more exposed ...

@kwameivanov From hands-on experience, Higher-voltage power architectures reduce resistive losses and current draw through the wiring harness for a given power level, which is part of why some newer platforms are moving away from lower-voltage packs as total system power demand climbs.

Can I ask a dumb follow-up - Best-in-class lithium-ion cells used in humanoids are currently landing around 280-300 Wh/kg, which is respectable but still leaves battery mass as one of the largest single contributors to total robot weight.