How do you plan charging infrastructure for a fleet that grows over time?

[cynthia.muller]

Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: Tesla's Optimus Gen 2 reportedly carries roughly a 2.3 kWh pack and manages about two hours of dynamic work, while Unitree's H1 runs a smaller 0.864 kWh pack good for under four hours of largely static operation - a useful illustration of how battery size and workload type both drive runtime. Solid-state battery claims from platforms like XPeng's IRON, GAC's GoMate, and EngineAI's T800 are genuinely promising on paper for energy density and safety margins, but independent, large-scale field validation of those runtime claims is still fairly limited as of 2026 - it's real progress, not yet fully proven at scale.

[jchen]

Not sure I fully agree here. 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-load cycles like continuous lifting. 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 rather than a purpose-built humanoid standard.

[carter42]

This raises a question for me - Hot-swappable battery packs solve the runtime bottleneck for continuous operations (like a 24/7 warehouse shift) without needing a much bigger, heavier pack, but they add mechanical complexity, a failure-prone connector interface, and logistics overhead for managing spare packs.

[wei_ross]

@carter42 I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly. Solid-state battery claims from platforms like XPeng's IRON, GAC's GoMate, and EngineAI's T800 are genuinely promising on paper for energy density and safety margins, but independent, large-scale field validation of those runtime claims is still fairly limited as of 2026 - it's real progress, not yet fully proven at scale. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[robertmiller]

@wei_ross Agreed, and I'd add: Distributed power architectures (multiple smaller packs or local capacitor buffering near high-draw actuators) can reduce peak current demands on the main bus and improve fault isolation, at the cost of added complexity versus a single central pack. Solid-state battery claims from platforms like XPeng's IRON, GAC's GoMate, and EngineAI's T800 are genuinely promising on paper for energy density and safety margins, but independent, large-scale field validation of those runtime claims is still fairly limited as of 2026 - it's real progress, not yet fully proven at scale.

[joseph31]

@robertmiller This matches something I went through recently. DC-DC conversion losses across all the individual actuator drivers add up across a whole robot - it's a less glamorous efficiency question than battery chemistry, but power electronics efficiency meaningfully affects real-world runtime too.

[williams84]

@joseph31 This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for. DC-DC conversion losses across all the individual actuator drivers add up across a whole robot - it's a less glamorous efficiency question than battery chemistry, but power electronics efficiency meaningfully affects real-world runtime too. Anyway, good thread - following for more.