Does planning the centre of pressure off the middle of the sole let a stock humanoid carry faster?

research/buildbot-carrycop

Does moving the planned centre of pressure along the sole raise a humanoid's carry speed? Not by a constant offset: the G1's 4 kg result moves one grid cell (0.10 to 0.13 m/s) and joint torques, not the sole, set the limit.

6 tests

What it found

A one-parameter test of the idea that the pessimistic carry speeds of buildbot-carryphase come from planning the centre of pressure (CoP) at the foot's middle. The CoP is held at offsets from −6 to +9 cm along the sole and the Menagerie G1 and H1 are re-scored over 1,944 cases (payload, step length, step time) by inverse dynamics against joint torque limits. Offset 0 reproduces the earlier speeds; the best offset moves one result by one grid cell (G1 at 4 kg, 0.10 to 0.13 m/s) and nothing else. Torque limits, not the sole, bind: 125–150 of the G1's 180 cases per offset exceed a torque limit. A negative result for a constant offset; it does not test a time-varying CoP, trunk or arm motion, or a learned policy. Prescribed gait, no falls or energy scored, not a safety case.

A figure from its own output

Figure produced by research/buildbot-carrycop: figure — buildbot-carrycop/experiments/figure.png, written by the project's own experiment code.

Paper, code and results

More in Robots on the building site

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Other research topics

Proper scoring & elicitation28 Effort & peer prediction9 Verification games & slashing19 Detection & tolerances14 Markets as routers13 Prediction-market design9 Paying contributors8 Decentralised training systems23 Digital twins & sim-to-real164 LLM chip design loops40 Robot manufacturing loops53 Ambient AI assistant46 Self-replicating manufacturing34 Simulation-first design64 Engineered clothing45 Task-specific AI accelerators40 Algorithmic chip-design loops42 Open-source purpose-built robots44 The software-engineering loop43 Adversarial human imitation41 Open-source residential construction41 Autonomous multi-angle capture34 Sensing, imaging and 3D31 Energy supply and dense energy storage39 Robot societies among people31 Agentic co-design of low-cost robots27 Laundry-hanging robots25 Machine learning on qualitative data23 Robots on the building site27 Civilizations & group psychology1 History & human sciences1

Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.