What we read, build and learn while giving humanoid robots real jobs.
GXO on why hands beat acrobatics, blind dexterity on the G1 from joint encoders alone, MINERVA at 0.54M parameters, and a 1,500-hour bimanual dataset.
Lightberry’s $39,990 Lumi on a Unitree base, sensorless damage-safe grasping, the Koala co-design gripper, and why fine manipulation still decides utility.
Hardware is racing ahead; teaching is the bottleneck. Why demonstrations recorded on the robot itself beat video datasets and VR teleoperation rigs.
Tendon vs. direct-drive hands, Unitree on why humanoids are not in factories yet, NVIDIA SONIC at 99.2% tracking, and teleoperation as the near-term bridge.
NVIDIA SONIC on the Unitree G1, Hugging Face's open Physical AI push, and why the humanoid bottleneck is shifting to the gripper interface.
