Humanoid-universe.com

Slightly off-topic, but related: Reflected inertia is what a limb 'feels like' to the outside world through the gearbox - a high-ratio harmonic drive reflects a lot of the rotor's inertia back to the joint, making the limb feel stiffer and less forgiving on unexpected impacts.

<t>@young58 This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for.

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 ...

<t>This raises a question for me -

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.

Kind of makes me think about how ...

<t>Related question -

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 near-field manipulation and reserve LiDAR (if present at all ...

<t>@samuel.campbell8 Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here.

A lot of what reads as 'full autonomy' in public demos is closer to a mix of scripted state machines, teleoperation for the hardest sub-tasks, and autonomous execution for the easier, well-rehearsed parts ...

<t>@mia.weber Follow-up question though -

The market consolidation question (which of the 100+ companies chasing this space survive) is complicated by the fact that hardware is genuinely capital-intensive to scale, so smaller players without a clear cost or technology moat are structurally at ...

<t>@barbara_liu Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit.

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 ...

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

In the UK, base salaries for robotics roles reportedly range from around £50,000 for new graduates up to roughly £200,000 for senior whole-body-control or reinforcement-learning specialists - a notably wide band reflecting how specialized ...

<t>Small correction on one detail:

Remote work remains genuinely limited for most hands-on humanoid hardware roles, given the need for physical access to robots and test environments, though software-only roles (simulation, perception algorithms, offline learning) increasingly do offer remote or ...

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

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 roles ...