SONIC controller now runs on full-size humanoids

Zhengyi "Zen" Luo says the SONIC controller is now running on full-size humanoids. His post shows two robots side by side, the AgitBot A3 on the left and the UBTech Walker C1 on the right.

Zhengyi “Zen” Luo

@zhengyiluo

X

SONIC is now on full-size humanoids!!!

That is the whole announcement. Luo named the two platforms, linked to each, and attached video. He did not post success rates, run lengths, task descriptions, or whether anything in the clips is autonomous.

What the clips show

Chris Paxton shared the footage and made the point that size changes how a demo reads in person. His line was that you cannot really tell from a video on X, but that full sized robots hit different.

That is worth holding onto when you watch it. A controller that looks fine on a small humanoid is working against very different mass and inertia on a full-size machine, and a phone screen flattens all of that. It also means the clip alone does not tell you how well this works.

Shown versus claimed

What is shown is SONIC moving two large humanoids. What is claimed is nothing beyond that. There is no comparison against a previous version, no statement about how long a run lasts before failure, and no indication of whether an operator is involved at any point.

So read this as a port to bigger hardware rather than a measured capability jump. Those are different things, and the difference matters because scaling a motion controller up to a heavier robot is a real engineering result on its own, while a capability claim needs numbers that nobody has published here.

The open questions are the obvious ones. How stable is it across a long run, how much of the behavior transfers between the A3 and the Walker C1, and what the controller does when it is pushed. Nobody has answered those yet, and until Luo or either robot maker posts more, the video is the only evidence on the table.

Chris Paxton

@chris_j_paxton

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you can't really tell from x, but full sized robots really hit different