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<t>@harmonicjen60 Agreed, and I'd add:

Field-oriented control (FOC) tuning directly affects how smooth torque output feels - poorly tuned current loops show up as audible whine and jerky low-speed motion, while well-tuned FOC can make even a geared actuator feel fairly fluid. It's common for a ...

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

Tactile skin arrays have improved a lot, but 'good enough to matter' really depends on the task - coarse contact detection across a large area is fairly mature, while fine, high-resolution force distribution sensing (like a human fingertip ...

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

Balance-recovery controllers are usually evaluated with push-recovery tests (a known, repeatable lateral push) in demos, but real-world robustness also depends on recovering from unstructured events like uneven flooring, unexpected ...

<t>I dealt with almost this exact situation.

The common academic path into this field is a master's or conversion course in robotics or machine learning, followed by an internship or research role at a known lab or company - a PhD is common but increasingly not strictly required for industry ...

<t>@carol38 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 ...

<t>@camila.jackson0 This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for.

Physical Intelligence's pi0 pairs a smaller pretrained vision-language backbone with a separate flow-matching 'action expert' module, which is one way to get fast, high-frequency action output without needing the whole ...

<t>@scott.novikova7 Ran into exactly this myself.

Object occlusion by the robot's own hand during the final approach to a grasp is a common and annoying perception problem - the closer the hand gets to a good grasp position, the more it blocks the camera's view of exactly what it's about to grab ...

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

Tesla reportedly deployed more than 1,000 Optimus Gen 3 units into its own Fremont, Austin, and Berlin factories starting around January 2026, with a stated capacity target near 100,000 units for the year - it's worth noting ...

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

How much ML background a controls role actually requires varies a lot by company and team - some whole-body control positions remain heavily classical-optimization-focused, while others increasingly expect familiarity with reinforcement learning or imitation ...

<t>Short answer:

Regenerative braking on humanoid joints can recover some energy during deceleration phases of walking, but the actual energy recovered is modest compared to a vehicle, since humanoid joints don't sustain the same continuous high-speed rotation that makes regen worthwhile in EVs ...