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<t>Ran into exactly this myself.

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. Distributed ...

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

A first successful unassisted walk, from a standing start on a from-scratch project, commonly takes many months of part-time weekend work even for someone with a solid mechanical and software background - it's a genuinely hard milestone, not a ...

@thomasmitchell Agreed, and I'd add: Boston Dynamics' commercial electric Atlas switched fully from hydraulic to QDD-style electric actuation, ending up quieter and lighter with comparable or better dynamic performance than the old hydraulic platform.

<t>Small correction on one detail:

Estimating joint torque from motor current draw is cheap and requires no extra sensor, but it's less accurate than a dedicated torque sensor because it doesn't capture friction losses through the gearbox - good enough for coarse control, not always for precise ...

<t>@scott21 Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit.

Diffusion policies model the distribution of possible actions and sample from it, which handles multimodal manipulation tasks (multiple valid ways to grasp something) more naturally than a single deterministic action output, at the cost ...

@chloe_jack Minor factual note: Palm sensing gets less attention than fingertip sensing, but a lot of power grasps (holding a box, a tool handle) rely more on palm and lateral finger contact than fingertip contact, so under-sensing the palm can leave a real blind spot in grasp confidence.

<t>@emilyperez Follow-up question though -

Thermal margin in a densely packed humanoid chassis is often the real limiting factor on sustained performance, not raw motor power - actuators get thermally throttled well before they'd hit their absolute torque limits, especially during repeated high ...

+1 to this. Worth adding: 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>@carol38 One nitpick -

A whole-body control engineer's day-to-day work is a mix of formulating and tuning constrained optimization problems, debugging why a controller behaves differently on hardware than in simulation, and a surprising amount of time spent on numerical stability and solver ...

<t>@thomasmitchell Just to be precise about one thing:

Companies like Figure, 1X, Apptronik, and Agility Robotics are reportedly pulling senior ROS, controls, and learning engineers directly out of warehouse-automation and industrial-robotics roles - a sign of real talent competition between ...