Ryan Mitchell

If you have ever watched a Boston Dynamics Atlas video and wondered how a robot can backflip, sprint across a warehouse floor, and pick up a heavy engine block without falling over, you are in good company. I have spent the last several weeks digging through Boston Dynamics engineering posts, DARPA documentation, and a year … Read more

I’ve been tracking humanoid robotics for years, and few platforms have generated as much buzz as the Unitree G1. If you’ve been wondering how does the Unitree G1 work, you’re not alone. This compact bipedal robot from Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics has become a focal point for researchers and developers because it packs serious capability … Read more

I’ve been following humanoid robotics closely for years, but the Figure AI humanoid robot is the first platform where I can explain the entire system, from the silicon in its head to the fingertips on its hands, in a single answer. In this guide I’ll walk you through how Figure AI’s robot actually works: the … Read more

If you have been asking how does Tesla Optimus work, you are not alone. The Tesla Optimus humanoid robot combines end-to-end neural networks borrowed from Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software with a fully custom mechanical body. It uses onboard cameras, joint-level actuators, and imitation learning to walk, lift, sort objects, and perform repetitive tasks. In this … Read more

When a humanoid robot takes a step, hundreds of forces act on its body at once. The question every bipedal robot engineer has to answer is simple: will it stay upright, or will it fall? The answer, for more than half a century, has come from a single concept: the zero moment point bipedal walking … Read more

I have spent countless late nights in robotics labs watching students stare at a motionless machine, frustrated because it will not respond to commands. The good news is that most unresponsive robot problems follow predictable patterns, and a systematic approach gets you back to working code faster than guessing. In this guide, I will walk … Read more

If you have ever walked through a modern factory and watched a robotic arm pick, place, and weld in perfect rhythm, you have seen the result of a quiet conversation. That conversation happens between the robot controller and a programmable logic controller, and it is one of the most important conversations in industrial automation. I … Read more

Humanoid robots balance by using a constant feedback loop: IMU sensors and force/torque sensors measure the robot’s orientation and ground contact forces, a control algorithm computes the deviation of the center of mass from the support polygon, and joint actuators adjust hundreds of times per second to keep the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) inside the … Read more

How do humanoid robots walk? The short answer is that they coordinate dozens of sensors, motors, and software layers hundreds of times per second to keep their center of mass over a support polygon roughly the size of a single shoe. I have spent years digging into this topic, and the deeper I go, the … Read more

A humanoid robot is a machine built to look and move like a human body, typically featuring a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs. We have tracked humanoid robotics for over a decade on Smashing Robotics, and feels like the year the technology stopped being a research demo and started showing up on … Read more