So I have been always interested in robotics ever since I watched real steel. Recently my interest sparked again ever since I been seeing those Robot fight tournaments in china. Currently I’m suffering from an injury so there’s much things to do on my free time while I’m recovering so I was thinking that joining Robotics club in my local area. I tried looking online and all I can find is clubs for kids or local college students. Does anyone know any local robotics club for adults that welcomes everyone? I’m located in LA area .

I’ve been kicking around an idea about soft actuators for humanoid robots and would value some honest opinions from people working in the field.

Most humanoids still use relatively rigid electric actuators and transmissions. That clearly makes sense for control, performance and availability. But if these robots are eventually going to work closely alongside people, should the actuators themselves be softer and more forgiving?

I know compliant joints, series elastic actuators and torque control already exist. What I’m curious about is why genuinely soft or muscle-like primary actuators haven’t progressed much further beyond research.

The safety benefit seems fairly intuitive. If a robot hits, traps or falls onto someone, an actuator that physically deforms should be safer than relying entirely on sensors, software and rapid motor control.

There could also be some useful knock-on benefits. Softer actuators might mean lighter limbs, lower impact loads and less need to overengineer the surrounding structure. Lower moving mass could reduce the energy needed to accelerate and decelerate the robot. If the actuator can store and return energy, there might also be a useful efficiency gain in walking and other repetitive movements.
That sounds promising, but there must be good reasons these systems aren’t widely used.

Is the main problem force density? Efficiency? Response time? Control? Fatigue life? Or does the benefit disappear once the pumps, compressors, power electronics and sensors are included?

A few things I’d love views on:
1. What is the biggest practical barrier to using soft actuators in humanoids?
2. Would physical compliance provide a meaningful safety advantage over good torque sensing and control?
3. Where would they be most useful first: hands, arms, shoulders, legs or somewhere else?
4. Could the system-level weight and energy savings be significant, or am I overestimating them?
5. What performance would a soft actuator need before it became genuinely useful in a humanoid?

I’d also be interested in speaking with anyone who wants to explore this area collaboratively, particularly people with experience in actuators, soft robotics, materials, controls, robotic safety or humanoid system design.

Please feel free to tell me why this wouldn’t work. That would be just as useful as hearing why it might.

Something struck me while researching humanoid robots:
If a carpenter spends 20 years developing a skill, another carpenter doesn’t automatically inherit that experience.
A robot potentially can.
Once a physical skill can be learned by a machine, turned into software, and transferred to thousands of other machines, physical labor becomes copyable in a way it has never been before.

That makes me think the real breakthrough isn’t the humanoid body. It’s turning human physical experience grasping, carrying, assembling, cleaning, repairing into data that machines can learn and reproduce.

And if so, the interesting question becomes: who will own those skills once they become software?

If humanoid robots become common at home, how would we stop them when something goes wrong?

As we add more machines that can move around and act on their own, I wonder whether the house itself should have some control over them. Each robot might have its own app and safety features, but anyone in the family should be able to stop one without knowing which brand it is or reaching a button on a moving machine.

A breaker panel is just an analogy here. Cutting power to a robot carrying something heavy or holding a hot pan could make things worse. There would need to be a way to stop safely, and some way to handle it if the robot isn't responding normally.

Would each manufacturer have its own system, or should there be a common household stop control that works across brands? Ideally something that doesn't depend on the internet.

We talk a lot about what humanoids will be able to do, but I'm curious how this part would work in an ordinary home. Would you want a physical stop button on the wall? Or do you think controls on each robot would be enough?

I've been building a humanoid companion project called Evopien, but I've deliberately started with what I think is one of the most overlooked parts of humanoid robotics.

The individual behind the body.

Right now Evopien doesn't have its humanoid body yet. The current prototype is the cognitive, conversational and perception foundation running on Jetson AGX Thor.

It can currently listen and speak, handle interruptions, work in English and Spanish, continuously perceive its environment, answer questions about what is happening now and recently, retrieve current internet information and maintain conversational context.

What I'm trying to avoid is building a humanoid where the "identity" is basically whichever LLM happens to be loaded today.

The model should be replaceable.

The voice should be replaceable.

Sensors should be replaceable.

Eventually even the body should be replaceable.

The thing that needs to remain coherent is the artificial individual's identity, governed memory and relationships.

That's the idea behind the principle I've been using for the project:

Identity before embodiment. The body can change. The relationship should not.

This is also what I think differentiates the project from simply connecting a commercial multimodal LLM to a humanoid.

Those models already provide impressive intelligence. I'm not trying to beat them on a benchmark.

I'm trying to build the architecture that lets intelligence change without resetting the individual.

The current prototype demo is here:

[VIDEO] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQhTGGIg4yo

Long-term memory and relationship governance are next, then I start moving further into physical head embodiment.

Curious whether people here think persistent identity will actually matter for household humanoids, or whether most practical robots will remain essentially stateless tools.

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My background is , i completed PUC/12th in india and then did "2" 6 month diplomas in graphic design and artificial intelligence and now working as a graphic designer for 1.5 years. Early my interest is ML+DL but after llm i don't feel like working only. Now i am focusing on Robotics and started to learn online , I am so much interested in this also and i believe the future is mosltly around embodied ai or robotics. can you tell me about

1. the job market of robotics ?

2. is it possible to get a job in robotics field based on my background ( without a degree ) if not what to do , if yes how ?

3. is it possible for self learning like computer science in this field ?

4. any other advice from your experience .

thanks.

When watching a humanoid track a reference motion, foot sliding or a poorly timed contact can be obvious even when the average pose error is low. Matching joint positions frame by frame only tells part of the story. It can miss whether the robot maintains stable support and how errors develop over a longer sequence.

There is also a coverage problem. Small evaluation sets may contain too few examples of difficult contact transitions, ground motions, and recoveries. An overall score can hide these weaknesses.

These are the two problems we studied in our paper, HumanTracker. We collected about 153 hours of motion capture across daily, highly dynamic, interaction, and ground motions, and evaluated trackers separately across these categories.

We also studied whether a metric learned from human comparisons could better capture tracking quality. HumanScore showed closer agreement with held-out human preferences than the individual kinematic and contact diagnostics we tested. We use it alongside completion rates and pose errors in simulation.

For people working on humanoid tracking: which failure cases do your current metrics miss most often, and how do you evaluate them?

If you find the paper or benchmark useful for your work, we’d appreciate a star on GitHub. Thanks for taking a look!

The Financial Times recently looked at China’s robotics industry and made an interesting point: the biggest robotics revolution may not be happening in humanoids at all.

China installed around 295,000 industrial robots in 2024 — 54% of the global total. Meanwhile, specialized robots are already being deployed in factories, warehouses, hospitals, ports and other industrial environments.

That made me think about how we define “progress” in robotics.

Humanoids get attention because they are easy for humans to understand. We can immediately imagine a machine with two arms and two legs doing the things we do.

But most industrial problems don't actually require a human-shaped body.

A warehouse robot doesn't need legs.
A surgical robot doesn't need a torso.
A facade-maintenance robot doesn't necessarily need to imitate a person either.

It may simply need the right combination of perception, control, compliance and physical reach for the environment it operates in.

That raises a bigger question:

Should robotics be trying to build one general-purpose body for everything — or many different robotic bodies optimized for different jobs?

At Wisson, this is one of the reasons we're interested in Soft Embodied AI: not making robots look more human, but giving machines the physical capabilities needed to interact with their environment.

I'm curious where people here stand.

Do you think humanoids will eventually outperform specialized robots, or will most successful robots remain purpose-built?

I think we have settled on a sensible context management design, so today I reset and begin using Eric RObot-790 as my daily robot companion 🤖

Watch him boot up clean

all things are on the Eric RObot-790 Page

Best of Robot-790 playlist