Humanoid-universe.com

<t>@jlefebvre Yeah, this tracks with what I've read as well.

Force/torque sensors near the ankle give a direct read on ground reaction forces, which is valuable for balance control, but they add cost, a failure point, and routing complexity right at a joint that already takes the most mechanical ...

Just to be precise about one thing: 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>One nitpick -

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 of slower inference. A lot of what reads as ...

<t>@joseph.robinson I dealt with almost this exact situation.

Payload-to-hand-weight ratio varies a lot across current dexterous hands, and it's a meaningful tradeoff - more DoF and finer sensing generally means more actuators and mass in the hand itself, which eats into the arm's usable payload ...

I'd push back on this a bit. 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.

This is a great summary, thanks. Idle/standing power draw is often surprisingly close to a meaningful fraction of active walking power draw once you account for onboard compute, sensors, and balance-holding torque - 'doing nothing' still costs real energy on a humanoid.

<t>@brenda52 Just to be precise about one thing:

A BMS (battery management system) has to guard against transient current spikes from sudden gait changes or lifting motions, not just steady-state draw - peak current headroom and fast-acting protection logic matter as much as total capacity for ...

@chenperez Just to be precise about one thing: 1X's NEO platform is notable for explicitly targeting home use rather than only industrial deployment, which is a meaningfully different (and arguably harder) engineering and safety target than warehouse or factory-floor robots.

<t>@ronald.clark Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it:

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 ...

From what I've seen: Robotics engineers in the US were reportedly seeing $150k-$205k total comp at mid-level and $205k-$300k at senior level in 2026, with humanoid- and foundation-model-specialist roles clearing $280k-$475k - a meaningful premium over general robotics/automation roles.