Humanoid-universe.com

<t>@edward.nelson +1 to this. Worth adding:

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 adjacent ...

<t>@forgecam45 I'd push back on this a bit.

Roughly 7,000-8,000 commercial humanoids are estimated to be operational worldwide as of mid-2026, which sounds like a lot until you compare it to the millions of industrial arms already installed. The 'humanoid' form factor mostly wins on ...

I'd frame this differently. 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 abuse.

<t>Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it:

Tendon-driven fingers let you move the heavier actuators back into the palm or forearm, keeping the fingers themselves light and fast, but they introduce cable routing, tensioning, and long-term wear problems that direct-actuated fingers don't ...

<t>@deborahperez This raises a question for me -

XPeng's IRON humanoid debuted with a solid-state battery, part of a broader trend of Chinese entrants (alongside GAC's GoMate and EngineAI's T800) pushing energy-density and runtime claims that Western competitors haven't yet matched in announced ...

<t>Not sure I fully agree here.

UC Berkeley's Berkeley Humanoid Lite is a genuinely open-source, roughly $5,000, 3D-printable humanoid - structural parts print on a standard desktop printer (around a 200x200x200mm build volume), with CAD files, parts lists, assembly instructions, and control code ...

<t>I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly.

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 ...

<t>@servoken70 +1 to this. Worth adding:

A lot of hobbyists underestimate how much of the real difficulty in a DIY humanoid build is software and tuning rather than mechanical assembly - getting a robot to physically stand up is a much smaller fraction of the total project time than getting it to ...

<t>Agreed, and I'd add:

Self-reported deployment and uptime numbers from humanoid companies are inherently hard to independently verify, since there's no standardized, third-party reporting requirement yet - a healthy dose of skepticism toward company press releases is reasonable until ...

<t>I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified.

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 ...