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Genuine beginner question - 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 hand can.

I dealt with almost this exact situation. Encoder resolution requirements scale with how tightly you need to control low-speed motion - coarse encoders are fine for open-loop swing phases but cause visible stutter during precise placement or fine force control.

<t>I can speak to this a bit.

Quasi-direct drive (QDD) actuators use lower gear ratios (roughly 6:1 to 10:1) paired with high-torque-density motors, trading some peak force density for backdrivability and low reflected inertia, which matters a lot for impact tolerance and fall recovery. It's ...

<t>@sven.wilson4 This lines up with my experience.

A minimum viable sensing suite for safe bipedal walking generally includes joint encoders, an IMU for orientation/angular velocity, and either force/torque sensing or accurate current-based torque estimation at the ankles - everything else ...

<t>Still learning the space, so correct me if wrong -

ROS2 remains common in research and early-stage products for its tooling and ecosystem, but a number of production humanoid companies run custom, more tightly-optimized middleware for their real-time control loops, using ROS2-like tooling ...

<t>@carlossanchez This matches something I went through recently.

Wet, oily, or otherwise low-friction objects are still a genuine edge case for most current hands, since tactile sensing and grasp-force controllers are typically tuned and validated on dry, higher-friction test objects. Figure's ...

<t>@park44 Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting:

There's no widely standardized safety certification specific to humanoid battery packs yet in most jurisdictions - deployments generally lean on adapted versions of existing standards for industrial battery systems and electrical safety ...

<t>Sorry if this is a basic question, but

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 ...

<t>Sorry if this is a basic question, but

The Berkeley Humanoid Lite stands about 1 meter tall and weighs roughly 16 kg, which is a genuinely reasonable target size for a first serious hobbyist build - big enough to be a real bipedal platform, small enough to not need industrial-scale actuators ...

<t>Counterpoint:

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 can meaningfully substitute for ...