Humanoid-universe.com

<t>From hands-on experience,

'General purpose' in 2026 mostly means 'can be reprogrammed for a new task without new hardware,' not 'can walk into any environment and figure things out unsupervised.' The safety case for humanoids working near people usually leans on compliant/backdrivable joints ...

@joseph.robinson Just to be precise about one thing: 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>This lines up with my experience.

LiDAR gives reliable, lighting-independent range data but is heavier, pricier, and gives sparser point clouds up close than stereo or depth cameras, which is why a lot of humanoids lean on stereo/depth cameras for near-field manipulation and reserve LiDAR (if ...

This lines up with my experience. 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>Slight correction, though the overall point stands:

Sim-to-real transfer still commonly breaks on contact dynamics - friction, restitution, and deformable/compliant surfaces are the hardest things to model accurately in simulation, so policies trained purely in sim often need real-world fine ...

<t>From hands-on experience,

Balance-recovery controllers are usually evaluated with push-recovery tests (a known, repeatable lateral push) in demos, but real-world robustness also depends on recovering from unstructured events like uneven flooring, unexpected contact, or a dropped payload ...

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

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>@kwilliams I see it a little differently.

Cable routing through a wrist joint with multiple degrees of freedom is a genuinely tricky mechanical design problem - tendons and wiring both need enough slack to avoid binding through the full range of motion without tangling or fraying over ...

<t>@samuel.adams +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 ...

<t>@ethan_fisc That's the official framing, at least - reality tends to lag a bit.

Active employers hiring specifically for humanoid-relevant roles span both established robotics companies (Shadow Robot, Engineered Arts, PAL Robotics) and the newer venture-funded players (Figure, 1X, Apptronik ...