About

I write as hitgavin. I am a control engineer working on humanoid robots in China, and this site is where I write about the part of that work that belongs to everyone: the methods, the tooling, and what the industry looks like from the inside.

In email, Gavin is fine.

What you will find here

• Field Notes from Shenzhen — What the Chinese robotics industry looks like from inside it: supply chains, spec sheets, and the engineering culture behind the shipping cadence.
• Agents on Metal — AI coding tools were built for a feedback loop measured in seconds. Here is what happens when the loop runs through a compiler, a flash cycle, and a machine in a lab.
• Equations to Encoders — Control theory carried all the way to hardware — derivations, then the measurement that says whether the derivation was right.

The standard

The topics here are wide — supply chains, agent tooling, control theory. What holds them together is not the subject but the method, and it is worth stating plainly so you can hold me to it:

Primary sources. Real numbers. And an explicit statement of where the uncertainty is.

That last one matters most. When a figure comes from a public catalogue rather than something I measured, I will say so. When I am extrapolating, I will say that too. A reader who cannot tell the difference between what I know and what I am guessing has no reason to trust either.

Nothing here comes from my employer. Where a post touches my day job, the method is mine and the data is from simulation, public URDFs, published specifications, or hardware I bought myself.

Get in touch

Email is best: hitgavin@gmail.com. I read everything, and I reply to anything that is not a pitch.

I take a small amount of consulting work — usually joint-level control and system identification, or helping teams outside China understand the actuator supply chain here. If that is why you are reading, say so in the first line and I will tell you quickly whether I can help.

Following along

Everything published here is available as a feed, orlong-form only if the short posts are noise to you. If you would rather have the essays by email, the form below does that and nothing else.