So a light, small humanoid with less joints (2 finger grippers, minimum hip/feet joints etc) and bulky servos would do better here.
If you added a Shadow hand (5 finger gripper) you'd add 24 to N, and I can't find max torque of the individual joints but I guess finger servos are less powerful than arm/leg servos.
And indeed NAO 25 (a pretty garbage robot for anything practical) is quite up there in the plot (better performance than Unitree humanoid that can do a backflip)
I would also imagine sensor modality should also be a performance factor?
MoonGhost 1 hours ago [-]
What is the way to go in hobby robotics today? I'm more interested in high level, and want the lower level to 'just work' with minimum efforts from my side. Having mechanical part and vision what would be the right choice for low-middle software to control robotic arm and car, may be attached one to another. ROS2?
bjackman 8 hours ago [-]
I think this is a great idea. It seems like we are entering the phase where the core hardware problems are solved and we now need to:
A) bring down cost and expand the design space for the hardware and
B) minimise the barriers to working on the "software" problems where there still seem to be huge areas of mostly unaddressed challenges.
An open source platform seems like a good thing for both.
lifeisstillgood 4 hours ago [-]
I have long assumed that we won’t be getting robot butlers partly because it’s really really hard, but also because most of not all things we want robots for it’s easier to reconfigure the environment than make a flexible humaniod
So factories are obvious but the real mass uptake is the home - and honestly I think something that cleans and tidies an hour a day might actually be achievable
hidelooktropic 2 hours ago [-]
How does that work for things like taking out the trash, doing dishes, and folding laundry?
why does it say the Berkeley Humanoid is closed source here? Is it a typo, was this paper peer-reviewed?
ChosenEnd 3 hours ago [-]
The "Berkeley Humanoid" is a distinct robot (they have the "Berkeley Humanoid Lite" named "ours" and colored in orange as the rightmost point on their graph).
RetroTechie 7 hours ago [-]
As much as I like the concept, 3D printing everything is not the way to lower cost.
Mass-produced (stamped / extruded / whatever) mechanical parts + hackable 'brains' is.
Robots do lend themselves well w/ respect to that last part. Worst case is rip out its control electronics wholesale & replace with your own motor drivers etc.
38 minutes ago [-]
abeindoria 7 hours ago [-]
Hm, perhaps not - but maybe give the users an option to print such parts, and warn that they may affect longevity of said parts if they do decide to go full manufacturing route.
My potential concern is the "Apple" gatekeeping of parts.
esafak 1 hours ago [-]
A 3D printed robot that costs $5000 exerts pressure on the price of mass-produced competitors.
taneq 5 hours ago [-]
It depends what you're doing. High volume parts, absolutely. It's one of the things that bugs me about the "3D printers printing printers" type projects. 3D printing is terrible for mass producing parts. If you're making 1000+ of something, injection mold it.
Low volume, probably customized parts like R&D robotics tends to need? 3D printing is great, especially if the design files are available so you can modify the parts as required before printing. And then if you break something you can print another one off overnight instead of stalling your project for weeks waiting for new parts to arrive.
dheera 20 minutes ago [-]
I was hoping "Lite" would be a smaller humanoid that I could build for <$5K, but this looks expensive.
frainfreeze 15 hours ago [-]
the cost-effectiveness/performance factor benchmark is interesting, but it feels slightly misleading - I just don't see how "average peak torque of all actuated DoFs, normalized by the robot's size" is related to measuring "accessibility and customizability" of the robot.
abdullahkhalids 15 hours ago [-]
What is interesting is that on their own metric, the Berkley Humanoid is only twice as expensive as the Berkley Humanoid Lite but has more than twice the "performance factor" (0.36 vs 0.14).
It shows they threw away too much while creating the lite version.
4ndrewl 9 hours ago [-]
Depends on the relative market size for performance factor though. If 90 percent of the market is captured by a 0.14 performance factor then that extra in price could be put towards solving another problem.
kaonwarb 14 hours ago [-]
Rather, I think we can say based on those datapoints that for their design, performance scales superlinearly with cost. Not surprising given fixed costs!
em0sh 13 hours ago [-]
The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as a licensed mechanical engineer I have ever seen. And I was around for Kony 2012.
The comment criticizes a chart or metric comparing "performance factor" to torque and degrees of freedom (DOFs) in robotics, calling it "the most silly thing" the commenter, a licensed mechanical engineer, has seen. By referencing "Kony 2012"—a widely mocked internet campaign—they emphasize their point about the chart's perceived absurdity. ([The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as ...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801052&utm_source=cha...))
The critique likely stems from the idea that combining performance factor, torque, and DOFs into a single comparison oversimplifies complex engineering concepts. Torque and DOFs are distinct mechanical properties, and "performance factor" is a vague term without a clear definition. Such a chart might misleadingly suggest direct correlations where none exist, leading to confusion or misinterpretation.
In essence, the commenter is expressing frustration over what they see as a technically flawed and potentially misleading representation of robotic performance metrics.
rout39574 6 hours ago [-]
Why do you think this excessively verbose bit of LLM vomit contributes to the conversation?
demaga 11 hours ago [-]
Very cool! Open source robotics is something I always imagined to be a part of the future. Hope the idea catches on.
bk496 9 hours ago [-]
A left handed robot!
gitroom 7 hours ago [-]
been cool watching robots go open source like this, always gets me thinking how much i could hack together something dumb just to see if it works
P = 1/(mhN) * sum(max_joint_torque)
N = num joints, m = mass, h = heigh of robot
So a light, small humanoid with less joints (2 finger grippers, minimum hip/feet joints etc) and bulky servos would do better here.
If you added a Shadow hand (5 finger gripper) you'd add 24 to N, and I can't find max torque of the individual joints but I guess finger servos are less powerful than arm/leg servos.
And indeed NAO 25 (a pretty garbage robot for anything practical) is quite up there in the plot (better performance than Unitree humanoid that can do a backflip)
I would also imagine sensor modality should also be a performance factor?
A) bring down cost and expand the design space for the hardware and
B) minimise the barriers to working on the "software" problems where there still seem to be huge areas of mostly unaddressed challenges.
An open source platform seems like a good thing for both.
So factories are obvious but the real mass uptake is the home - and honestly I think something that cleans and tidies an hour a day might actually be achievable
why does it say the Berkeley Humanoid is closed source here? Is it a typo, was this paper peer-reviewed?
Mass-produced (stamped / extruded / whatever) mechanical parts + hackable 'brains' is.
Robots do lend themselves well w/ respect to that last part. Worst case is rip out its control electronics wholesale & replace with your own motor drivers etc.
My potential concern is the "Apple" gatekeeping of parts.
Low volume, probably customized parts like R&D robotics tends to need? 3D printing is great, especially if the design files are available so you can modify the parts as required before printing. And then if you break something you can print another one off overnight instead of stalling your project for weeks waiting for new parts to arrive.
It shows they threw away too much while creating the lite version.
The comment criticizes a chart or metric comparing "performance factor" to torque and degrees of freedom (DOFs) in robotics, calling it "the most silly thing" the commenter, a licensed mechanical engineer, has seen. By referencing "Kony 2012"—a widely mocked internet campaign—they emphasize their point about the chart's perceived absurdity. ([The performance factor vs. torque vs. DOFs is the most silly thing as ...](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801052&utm_source=cha...))
The critique likely stems from the idea that combining performance factor, torque, and DOFs into a single comparison oversimplifies complex engineering concepts. Torque and DOFs are distinct mechanical properties, and "performance factor" is a vague term without a clear definition. Such a chart might misleadingly suggest direct correlations where none exist, leading to confusion or misinterpretation.
In essence, the commenter is expressing frustration over what they see as a technically flawed and potentially misleading representation of robotic performance metrics.
https://youtu.be/0Gkl1H2eKsM?t=99
Servitude: Robot Waiter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXsUetUzXlg
Empathy: Broken Robot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXrbqXPnHvE