Robotics essentials: FORM FACTOR
Two legs is the least efficient way to move a robot, and almost every humanoid company picked it anyway.
The design space runs from a bolted-down arm, to an arm on a wheeled base, to a quadruped, to a human torso on wheels, to a full biped.
Efficiency falls off a cliff as you go right.
The cleanest measurement is a robot that can do both: ETH's ANYmal, given wheels, drives at a cost of transport of 0.1, which is 83% cheaper than the same machine trotting on the same floor. It also more than doubles its top speed.
Wheels don't fall over, need fewer motors, and cost less to build.
And the floor the humanoids are aiming at is the one the world went out of its way to make flat.
Warehouse slabs are poured to a flatness spec; the robots already in them treat a 5 mm lip as a hazard.
Amazon runs over a million robots, not one of them has legs.
Boston Dynamics built a wheels-on-legs machine, Handle, then killed it and shipped Stretch, an arm on a wheeled box -> imagine doing warehouse work wearing rollerblades.
Legs earn their cost somewhere else.
Only 3.5% of American homes have a zero-step entrance, single-floor living and doorways wide enough to roll through.
The warehouse is a wheeled world. The house is not, and never will be retrofitted.
So the honest scoreboard for 2025: about 13,000 humanoids shipped worldwide, most of them to research labs, against a million wheeled machines inside Amazon alone.
Even Agility's Digit, the one biped doing paid work, has bird legs, not human ones.
The bipeds are winning the funding round while the wheels are winning the factory floor.
Three open source drops this week.
Featuring
@openmind_agi@almond_robotics@XSquareRobot
And today we’re dropping Kits on @tnkrdotai
Everything you need to build a robot, in one box. From project to assembly in days not weeks. Starting with Open Duck, XLeRobot, and Amazing Hand.
Meet Tnkr 2.0. https://t.co/QvE42dwgEY
Super excited to announce that #ProtoBot kits are now officially available for pre-order: https://t.co/JvK5YluWh3
After months of development, they’re finally here 🙈 The full build video drops in a couple of days - stay tuned!