Anyone attending any humanoid robotics meetups or conferences this year?

[jwang]

@scott.novikova7 This matches something I went through recently. Most flashy demo reels involve some amount of teleoperation, scripted sequencing, or cherry-picked takes - that's not necessarily dishonest, but it does mean the gap between 'demoed' and 'reliably autonomous in production' is still large. Open-source humanoid projects matter less for out-competing the well-funded players and more for keeping the barrier to entry low enough that new ideas and new people can actually get into the field.

[joseph_sing]

@jwang +1 to this. Worth adding: Legs earn their keep specifically where the environment wasn't redesigned for robots - stairs, curbs, uneven yards, cluttered floors - which is a smaller slice of real-world tasks than the marketing suggests. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[matthew.yamamoto0]

@joseph_sing From hands-on experience, Open-source humanoid projects matter less for out-competing the well-funded players and more for keeping the barrier to entry low enough that new ideas and new people can actually get into the field.

[ethan_fisc]

Sorry if this is a basic question, but Wheeled-torso designs solve 90% of warehouse and light-industrial tasks with far less complexity than a biped, which is exactly why so many 'humanoid' demos quietly have wheels under a skirt.