[HN Gopher] K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for...
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K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for developers
Author : rbanffy
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-05-18 19:16 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kscale.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kscale.dev)
| whatever1 wrote:
| "We work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. Most of us live, eat, and
| work at our facility. Hard problems, failures, and long hours
| don't deter us. While others talk, we ship."
|
| But here you are asking from us, the talkers, to design your RL
| reward function.
| breakyerself wrote:
| If they're really working that many hours then they probably do
| need help. All their hours are probably going towards fixing
| the stupid things they're doing in a burned out stupor. They'd
| probably get more done working half as many hours.
|
| Although if they can truly ship a 9,000 dollar humanoid robot
| that will be impressive. If their software sucks there's other
| options out there.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yea, the team is pretty small and we don't have Figure money
| unfortunately. Trying to do a lot. In reality, we do sleep 8
| hours a day and eat 3 square meals. It's just that we all
| live together and don't leave the house much
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| If you're young and single why not. Love your passion. I
| shared a house with my old cofounders and it was great.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Talk is cheap, but I can't say that I am not debating the
| cheapest variant and am already rehearsing how to sell it
| wife:D.
|
| Not that I think you do not have a point. I too worry that it
| seems to be a somewhat recent approach of too many aspiring
| platforms ( and therein may lie a problem ).
|
| Still..
| codekansas wrote:
| My suggestion (based off what would work for my own wife), if
| you have a 3D printer, make the 3D printed one first [0] then
| use that as a springboard into buying a metal one
|
| [0] https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-bot-01
| codekansas wrote:
| Well, designing RL rewards is the fun part. We can do it
| ourselves but I think that would defeat the purpose
| v9v wrote:
| For an open-source robot design the website seems quite light on
| the hardware details. All I was able to find from the link were
| the robots' physical dimensions in Imperial (?) units. There
| seems to be a github repository for the robots but the all the
| folders are empty. Nothing in the docs either. Does anyone have
| more details about the hardware?
| beau_g wrote:
| An older version of their repo (or some section I cannot find
| anymore) indicated they were at the time using a few different
| Robstride actuators -
| https://www.robstride.com/products/robStride04
| codekansas wrote:
| Yes that's correct, we're working with Robstride. We're gonna
| release the full hardware spec in a bit, will live in this
| repo -> https://github.com/kscalelabs/kbot
| codekansas wrote:
| Oh sorry about that, actually we are still putting together the
| hardware specs for the robot - we just launched the software
| SDK today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022106
| Planning to make an announcement about the hardware later
|
| We do have an entirely 3D printable robot with build guide
| here, if you're interested:
| https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-bot-01#/
| awongh wrote:
| It's cheaper than I would have expected. Are there other humanoid
| robots out there at this price?
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| There is Unitree, runs on Ros. I saw a demo a few days back and
| looked capable. Hands need to be bought separately though
| codekansas wrote:
| Yes, our goal is to be Unitree-level but US-based so we don't
| have tariff issues
| codekansas wrote:
| Yea, we built everything ourselves and tried to stay as low-
| cost as possible. In my opinion, humanoid robots are not very
| capable right now, so we sell it for a bit above cost for the
| time being. As the software capabilities improve we will
| increase the price.
| paulsutter wrote:
| We have specific industrial tasks to train and we're taking a
| closer look at this as an alternative to the hard-to-reach
| bigcorps that have their eyes too far down the road. We want to
| start now and push the current tech as far as it can go
|
| Looking forward to helping however we can
| codekansas wrote:
| Awesome! Would love to chat, here's my email: ben@kscale.dev
| canvascritic wrote:
| Heh. This landing page takes me to somewhere between deepmind
| circa 2014 and tesla's AI Day press decks.
|
| I mean if you're actually training humanoids in under an hour
| with sim-to-real transfer that "just works" then congrats, you've
| solved half of embodied AI
|
| the vertical integration schtick (from "metal to model") echoes
| early apple, but in the robotics space that usually means either
| 1) your burn rate is brutal and you're ngmi, or 2) you're hiding
| how much is really off-the-shelf
|
| Clearly the real play here, assuming it's legit, is the RL infra.
| K-Sim is def interesting if it's not just another wrapper over
| Brax/Isaac. Until we see actual benchmarks re say, dexterous
| manipulation tasks trained zero-shot on physical hardware, it's
| hard to separate "open-source humanoid stack" from the next pitch
| that ends in "-scale"
| codekansas wrote:
| Actually, we use COTS components for basically everything,
| that's how the price is so low. It's just that we do a lot to
| make sure we understand how everything works together from
| software to hardware
|
| IMO humanoid companies do make a lot of big claims which is why
| it's important to make everything open-source. Don't have to
| take my word for it, can just read the code
| canvascritic wrote:
| Thanks for the reply
|
| IME the COTS angle cuts both ways. It brings costs down and
| makes iteration faster, but whats the moat then?
|
| if the value is in integration, that's fine, but integration
| is fairly fragile IP. Open source is good reputationally but
| accelerates the diffusion of your edge unless the play is
| towards community+ecosystem lock-in or being the canonical
| reference impl (cf. ROS, HuggingFace)?
| codekansas wrote:
| Well, the point of being open-source is that I don't think
| there is much of a moat in the hardware, in the limit, and
| it's better to accelerate the ecosystem and start building
| standards. It's very similar to Tesla - electric cars are
| easier to build than gas cars, so the moat has to come from
| branding / integration / software (for reference, before
| K-Scale I worked on the FSD ML team at Tesla, which
| informed a lot of my thinking about what the right business
| model for this would look like).
|
| I think humanoids are in their infancy. Eventually most of
| the margin will come from software capabilities, which we
| do plan to charge a lot of money for (like, download a
| software package and your robot can clean your house,
| that's probably worth something). But in order for that
| business model to work we need to have commodity,
| standardized hardware.
| dang wrote:
| Pretty sure these guys did a Show HN the other day but I'm on my
| phone so I can barely do anything moderation-wise. In the
| meantime, does anybody want to link to the Show HN?
| codekansas wrote:
| Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022106
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