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<t>Just to be precise about one thing:

Sourcing small, precise harmonic drives as an individual hobbyist is genuinely difficult - most manufacturers focus on industrial customers with large order volumes, which is why a fair number of DIY builds substitute cycloidal drives, planetary gearboxes ...

@pierregreen Just to be precise about one thing: Anti-backlash techniques in production actuators range from mechanical preloading (spring-loaded gear meshes) to purely software compensation that models and corrects for known backlash in the control loop.

<t>@charlesbianchi From hands-on experience,

Series elastic actuators add a spring element in series with the drivetrain, which gives cheap, precise torque sensing (measure spring deflection) and passive shock absorption, at the cost of reduced control bandwidth and added complexity. Motor ...

<t>This lines up with my experience.

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 and knees where backdrivability and ...

<t>@scott21 Minor factual note:

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 less mature than for ...

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

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 ...

Minor factual note: Vibration is one of the most underrated sources of noisy IMU and tactile readings - mounting matters as much as sensor quality, and a poorly isolated mount can add more noise than the sensor's own datasheet specs would suggest.

<t>@karentaylor Small correction on one detail:

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>@rtorres Small correction on one detail:

Underactuated hands (fewer actuators than joints, using mechanical coupling to shape the grasp) are a reasonable engineering compromise for robust power grasps on a budget, but they generally can't do fine in-hand manipulation the way a fully actuated ...

<t>Just to be precise about one thing:

RSS (Robotics: Science and Systems), ICRA, and the IEEE-RAS Humanoids conference are commonly cited as the most directly relevant venues for someone specifically interested in legged locomotion and humanoid control research, as opposed to broader AI/ML ...