[HN Gopher] Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) - Open-Source Human...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) - Open-Source Humanoid Robots
Hi HN, I'm Ben, from K-Scale Labs (https://kscale.dev). We're
building open-source humanoid robots. Hardware video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhZi9rtdEKg Software video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXi3b3xXJFw Docs:
https://docs.kscale.dev Github: https://github.com/kscalelabs HN
thread from back in May:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023680 I started K-Scale
because I really wanted a humanoid robot to hack on, so I knew that
if I built one, I would have at least one customer. It was before
the Unitree G1 came out so the cheapest option at the time costed
over $50k, but I figured I could build one for about $10k using
COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) components, which would be a much
better price point for indie hackers and developers. We built the
first version using some 3D printers and parts that I bought off of
Amazon and Alibaba. It was not great, but it let us build out the
full pipeline, from designing and building the hardware to training
control policies in simulation. We actually did most of this in
about two months, and had a standing, waving robot by YC Demo Day
(although it wasn't good for much else!). Since then, our focus
has been on figuring out how to go from a hobby-grade robot to a
consumer-grade robot, without inflating our BOM (Bill of Materials,
i.e. cost of all the parts) or having to set up our own factories.
This is surprisingly difficult. A lot of the supply chain for
robotics components currently goes through China, but tariffs have
made it difficult to rely on Chinese suppliers for components.
Also, even a $10k price point is pretty expensive for most
customers, for a humanoid robot that has fairly limited
capabilities. Our solution to this is to open-source our hardware
and software. This makes it easier for us to navigate tariffs and
manufacturing challenges. By making our reference design public,
our suppliers have a much easier time figuring out how to offer us
competitive solutions, and our manufacturing partners are able to
more easily adjust our design for their production processes. On
the demand side, the basic problem with humanoid robots is that
they're mostly useless right now, and it will probably be a long
and fairly capital-intensive journey to make them useful. My
expectation was that there is a large pool of latent interest from
people like me who are interested in hacking on humanoids, and that
this customer segment is a much better customer segment to sell
into than more traditional business-focused robotics applications.
As someone in this customer segment myself, I felt that open-source
software and hardware would be a strong value proposition,
particularly for developers exploring bringing humanoids into their
own business verticals. More philosophically, I think it is
important that there is a good, open-source humanoid robot. I think
the technology is likely to mature much more rapidly than many
people currently expect, and the idea of armies of humanoids owned
by some single company walking around is pretty dystopian. Right
now, we're selling our base humanoid robot, K-Bot, for $8999. The
main reason we're selling it now, instead of waiting to do more
R&D, is because we're trying to negotiate volume prices with our
own suppliers before we do final DfM (Design for Manufacturing).
For example, we are able to negotiate better volume pricing for
actuators and end effectors than what the average indie developer
would be able to get for low-volume orders. However, a lot of the
people who want to buy a humanoid robot today do so because they
want a completely autonomous robot to do all their chores, which is
a pretty hard (although exciting) thing to build. To square this
circle, we're offering a "Full Autonomy" option - it is the same
robot hardware, but we will provide free hardware and software
upgrades until we are able to make the robot fully autonomous. This
way, we can have some extra cash upfront to kickstart development,
and start to build a core group of people who are aligned with
helping us improve the robot's capabilities across a diverse set of
environments. From our customers' perspective, it's a way to de-
risk buying a first-generation product from a young hardware
company, and to have a bigger influence on how the technology
unfolds. The best part about building open source software and
hardware is getting torn apart by people smarter than us, so we'd
love your feedback!
Author : codekansas
Score : 215 points
Date : 2025-07-03 16:44 UTC (1 days ago)
| lachyg wrote:
| Congratulations! This looks really great. What've you found to be
| the best hands / end effectors these days? When do you think
| we'll have good, reliable 5 finger hands that are ~reasonably
| priced?
| codekansas wrote:
| I'm not convinced that 5 finger hands are necessary right now,
| but there is a really long tail of hand suppliers that we've
| been exploring to help get the price down.
|
| I think at volume the price for a good set of hands should
| settle somewhere around $300-500. Most of it comes down to
| meeting suppliers where they're at and negotiating mutually
| beneficial deals. It's not magic but it does require having a
| good understanding of the hardware in order to negotiate well.
| mhb_eng wrote:
| Have you identified any limitations in current grippers based
| on lack of tactile sensing solutions to unlock truly dextrous
| manipulation?
| codekansas wrote:
| Actually yea, the benefit of our parallel gripper is that
| we get some proprioceptive feedback which we can't get from
| the current 5 finger hand. I'm not sure how important this
| will be long term - I think vision can eventually mostly
| compensate if the ML models are good enough
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| > _the demand side, the basic problem with humanoid robots is
| that they 're mostly useless right now ... ... to square this
| circle, ... we will provide free hardware and software upgrades
| until we are able to make the robot fully autonomous...This way,
| we can have some extra cash upfront to kickstart development_
|
| Congratulations guys! The technical stuff is above my paygrade,
| but you have a cracked team and with open source you will have a
| great chance to be close or at SOTA level at your price point.
|
| However, it looks to me that your core thesis is yes, when the
| autonomous robots get good enough, even at a medium family car
| price range they will sell like candies. Sure. But since you also
| want to have the cash now, to who exactly are you selling? Yes
| you promise that you will support the full autonomy option, but
| this sounds weirdly similar to Tesla selling cars promising the
| FSD, which we all know how that story went.
|
| I'm not saying you won't deliver, I'm just saying you might need
| to a bit more careful in your story selling/narrative for this.
| For example, i would be super interested to get one for like 2k
| if it's not useful now, but paying 10k for essentially promises
| and possible upgrades is a bit iffy. Hence i would like to at
| least see some plug in and play _current_ usecases? Even if they
| are just for fun.
| codekansas wrote:
| I spent two years on Tesla's FSD team, and I think from a cash
| flow perspective for funding R&D this model did make a lot of
| sense - basically, it takes cash upfront for training models,
| but there's zero marginal cost for distributing the models once
| you've developed them.
|
| I think this kind of "promise the future, pay now" model does
| alienates some people, especially when the tech is not ready
| today. That's why we're open sourcing everything, to avoid the
| feeling of overpromising on what is ready today. The core idea
| is that the people who bought FSD early on were very invested
| in it's success, and that feedback loop is very important for
| improving machine learning models at scale. The problem happens
| when actually delivering on the tech takes a long time, but I
| think we have a fairly clear technical roadmap to make our
| robot useful. At least, I think there are a lot more
| intermediate benchmarks for driving value for a humanoid robot
| than there are for self-driving cars, so I think people who buy
| it will have a stronger feeling that it is constantly
| improving.
| deepdarkforest wrote:
| From a cash flow perspective of course it makes sense to sell
| the future before you have it as working product. It just
| needs a great salesman or narrative to keep it going, im not
| arguing that.
|
| > _that feedback loop is very important for improving machine
| learning models at scale_
|
| Oh will you have your own feedback loop with let's say user's
| data? Or you meant as an example?
|
| > * That's why we're open sourcing everything, to avoid the
| feeling of overpromising on what is ready today*
|
| I agree here, it helps the today, but I dont think it helps
| the feeling of overpromising on what is ready today, its more
| like, even if it's open source , it does not increase the
| chances of it being ready/autonomous in the future. (im just
| playing devils advocate here)
|
| I also agree with the intermediate benchmarks for sure, this
| is more to what i was referring to, it would be nice to see
| some more short term usecases/fun applications that are
| realistic to hit today or in the nearer future, that would
| drive a lot of sales value, at least for me, rather than go
| from now to full autonomy. Good luck!
| codekansas wrote:
| > Oh will you have your own feedback loop with let's say
| user's data? Or you meant as an example?
|
| That's more or less the idea - obviously since it's open
| source we wouldn't scrape peoples' data without their
| consent, but I would hope that people would contribute to
| the project in some form. Like, the core idea of the open
| source ethos is that building something like this
| collaboratively is a better / cheaper way to scale data
| collection / experience than us trying to collect all the
| data ourselves.
|
| > it does not increase the chances of it being
| ready/autonomous in the future.
|
| Yea that's true. At the end of the day it's just technical
| execution, so it's pretty risky. I just prefer that if
| people sign up for something risky, it's pretty transparent
| what exactly it is they're signing up for :)
| timhigins wrote:
| > we're open sourcing everything
|
| Does/will this include the training data, hyperparams, and
| weights for the models?
|
| People will be reluctant to buy an "open source" robot if the
| key ML magic to make it work is closed off, e.g. if you
| charge a subscription for it.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yeah of course. That's kind of the whole point - I don't
| think you can really trust a humanoid robot in your house
| around your family if it is not clear what it's running.
| Basically, for myself, I would not want to buy a closed
| sourced humanoid, and I view myself as relatively
| representative of the early adopter mentality. So
| personally I think this is the right way to build a great
| product.
|
| I basically believe that in a world where humanoid robots
| are actually useful, we will not have any trouble
| monetizing. Probably we will verticalize manufacturing at
| some point in the future. I think the bigger risks for our
| business model are not from people copying us or something,
| but from not making progress fast enough.
| timhigins wrote:
| Great to hear, thanks for the response!
| a_t48 wrote:
| Love it. It's tough to balance keeping the ship afloat vs
| giving back to the community, I think you've got a good
| thing going.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Pretty sweet! Don't have the time (or budget) to directly invest
| in the hardware but do you have a list of open source "open"
| software problems you are looking to solve?
| codekansas wrote:
| We do! https://bounties.kscale.dev/
|
| We haven't updated it much but it's a good starter point
| pj_mukh wrote:
| Amazing, pretty nice list! Two quick suggestions:
|
| a) some of these definitely look they could be done without
| hardware or with light hardware support from a staff member?
|
| b) if you do a) and are open source completely I bet you
| don't even need to do bounties. The increased participation
| could mean some great community generated solutions quick.
| codekansas wrote:
| I think it's tricky to manage an open source community
| effectively while still being opinionated on the product. I
| don't want to get too sucked into coordinating adhoc
| contributors - we do have a strong core team of people, and
| we all live together, which is pretty important. But yea,
| still figuring out what the right dynamic here will look
| like. Thanks for the suggestions!
| pj_mukh wrote:
| That's fair, especially around firmware and things like
| OTA updates and lower level controls/safety you'd want to
| keep that closer to team.
|
| But on the long-tail of autonomy options? Implementing
| the latest papers, trying cutting edge solutions, I bet a
| thriving open-source community could be very helpful ala
| PR2, given that the hardware is already open-source.
|
| Nothing stopping you from picking and choosing from the
| various implementations to build into a streamlined
| product offering on the front end.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yep I definitely agree. Our team is pretty small and
| bandwidth limited
|
| I basically think our goal is to solve all the boring
| stuff and make it work reliably, so that other can people
| can try out the cool ML stuff more easily
| bbor wrote:
| Looks very cool! $9K is well outside my budget, but very
| reasonable for even small startups -- props.
|
| Small note: https://www.kscale.dev/why is a 404
| codekansas wrote:
| Oh thank you! Will fix
| fragmede wrote:
| https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/ is only $5000. What's the
| extra $3000 get me?
| codekansas wrote:
| Yeah, really like that project. The main difference is that
| it's much shorter than ours, and shorter robots are cheaper.
| The downside is that it can't really reach normal human spaces.
| Actually, we made another robot called Zeroth Bot which you can
| build for $350 if you want:
| https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-01
|
| We are planning to release a similar-size robot later this year
| (calling it M-Bot) that will be closer in height and price, but
| our current focus has been on launching the full-size humanoid.
|
| Mechanically, I think Berkeley Humanoid Lite is pretty similar
| to the 3D printed one we made last year. Our main focus with
| the K-Bot redesign was to make it not break so much. 3D printed
| components break a lot and repair time can be quite long. Also,
| having the wiring routed internally makes a huge, huge
| difference. So there are some benefits to doing QA on a
| manufacturing line in terms of quality and consistency.
| fragmede wrote:
| How far away from robot hands/manipulators that are dexterous
| enough to repair other robots?
| codekansas wrote:
| That is a good question. I think mechanically we're
| probably there today, but on the intelligence level, who
| knows... If I had to guess, probably 1-3 years
| fragmede wrote:
| obviously there's more to the kinematics than making the legs
| longer, but can't they just make the legs longer for it to be
| taller?
| codekansas wrote:
| Longer legs means more inertia on the actuators, which
| means bigger actuators + bigger battery, which means
| heavier robot, which means...
| fragmede wrote:
| right? thanks!
| srameshc wrote:
| I love the idea of humaniod robot and commercially available. I
| like to think of such expensive things as an investment rather
| than a toy if I have to buy. Question is what are some good use
| cases that can be solved with such a humanoid robot ?
| codekansas wrote:
| To be honest, I don't know that there are many applications
| today which humanoids are the best form factor to solve. I
| would view it more as a form factor that is likely to get much
| more useful over the next few years, and having the hardware in
| your home lets you try out new techniques as they come online.
|
| Personally, I think the first real use cases will mostly be
| entertainment. Humanoids have a high "coolness" factor. Also, I
| think there's a long tail of random problems which you don't
| want to buy a new robot to solve, but which, if you have a
| robot lying around that isn't perfect but is "good enough",
| might be possible to solve imperfectly. For example, I just had
| a newborn baby, and I was thinking it would be nice if I had a
| static arm that could hold his bottle for me. There's a lot of
| tail end problems like that in your day to day life. But I
| think the really interesting capabilities will come once
| there's very good end-to-end models running on-device.
| srameshc wrote:
| Thanks for an honest response. I did some google search and I
| see that even a simple Robotic arm costs over $15, so K-Bot
| is at a good price point . If I have to invest purely for
| learning and trying to integrate with something like Gemini
| Robotics SDK, do you think it will work ?
| codekansas wrote:
| Yeah, this is exactly the kind of use case we intend to
| support. Basically, we want our robot to be the best mass-
| produced robot for this kind of experimentation.
| chrsw wrote:
| I have some technical questions about feet.
|
| Human feet have metatarsophalangeal joints connecting the toes to
| the rest of the foot. But humanoid robots don't have these (at
| least, the vast majority don't). Why? These joints are very
| useful.
|
| Also, the bottom of the human foot is soft and has thousands of
| nerve endings. Can we really expect robots to get anywhere near
| human mobility performance without this level of compliance and
| sensory sophistication?
| codekansas wrote:
| So, most humanoids you see that are relatively cost-effective
| are just "humanoid" in that they look like humans, but there
| are significant mechanical differences between them and real
| humans. It's almost always driven by the cost of manufacturing
| different components. A good example is the lead screw you see
| in the knee and ankle on Optimus - while it is more human-
| centric to have tendon-like actuation, it drives the price up
| quite a bit. Put differently, humans have a lot of
| specialization which is not great if you want to mass
| manufacture something.
|
| For walking, the most important thing is that the robot can be
| simulated well, so in our case, we tried to model the foot
| contact with the ground in simulation quite accurately. In
| fact, we found that force sensors in the foot probably help but
| they're not necessary in simulation, and we wanted to shave off
| anything that wasn't necessary. I am not sure how close we will
| get to human mobility - it's definitely a learning process -
| but you can get much further in simulation than you'd expect.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| Feet/ankles on humanoids are really hard mechanically. In many
| ways the kinematic requirements for the ankle are similar to a
| wrist, but while the wrist of a robot arm is the least-heavily-
| loaded, the ankle area can be the most heavily loaded. Humans
| get away with it by having most of the highly-stressed
| actuators in the lower leg, not the ankle itself, whereas many
| humanoid robots end up putting more of the actuators in the
| ankle assembly itself.
|
| In general, I think the best way to think about the differences
| between human muscles and robot actuators is that human muscles
| are simultaneously incredible in terms of strength and power
| density, and also incredibly fragile. Robot actuators are
| fairly robust, but comparatively poor. Humans are essentially
| falling apart at all times, but the repair mechanisms in the
| body do a good enough job that it doesn't matter (although you
| probably know someone with a "career-disruptive/ending" sports-
| related injury that shows these mechanisms have limits).
| Robotics is a long way away from making actuators that can be
| fixed online in such a process. Even cable stretching in cable-
| driven mechanisms remains hard to handle effectively, and
| that's one of the simplest types of mechanism wear.
| bbertelsen wrote:
| These are the kinds of comments that make comments worth
| reading. Thank you!
| codekansas wrote:
| This is a much better answer than mine
| tlb wrote:
| There are certainly things a robot can't do with rigid feet,
| like climbing a tree or rock face.
|
| But anything a human can do with rigid shoes like wooden clogs
| should be possible. Whatever happens inside the clog stays
| inside.
| chrsw wrote:
| That sounds plausible but it is actually true? When I'm
| walking in the woods the ground is very uneven, has different
| friction between the ground and my feet, is sometimes soft,
| sometimes hard. Yes I have flat shoes or boots on. But
| they're just normally flat, not rigid. And my feet can still
| feel the ground beneath me, through the shoes. That helps me
| balance, know where to put my weight, etc. Mostly
| subconsciously. I almost never fall over, too.
|
| My concern is all the sophistication of the human anatomy
| isn't just useful, it's essential for something that's going
| to be less trouble than its worth.
| hmmmmmmmstve wrote:
| Seems like the thing is entirely manufactured and mostly designed
| by a Chinese company?
|
| https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/V_WVFSJg3cTPq0Y4gK4cHw
| amacneil wrote:
| That post says "manufactured", why would you assume "mostly
| designed"?
|
| Any robotics company that is not thinking about manufacturing
| from day 1 is not a serious robotics company.
| codekansas wrote:
| Tao Motors reached out to us about a month ago after our soft
| launch because they just bought a big factory in Texas to
| manufacture golf karts, and the supply chain for golf karts and
| humanoids is actually pretty similar. Their subsidiary invested
| some money in our company recently and we are partnering with
| them to scale manufacturing. I discussed this in our launch
| video.
| BrandiATMuhkuh wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch! This is really cool.
|
| I'm not super active in the humanoid robot space anymore, however
| I did my PhD about 9 years ago in HRI. That was the time of
| Boston Dynamics, DARPA robotics challenge, and Aldebaran's Pepper
| and Nao robots.
|
| You mentioned you are building everything open source. What
| happened with ROS and related projects? Do you build on top of
| that, or is that all super outdated that a reboot was needed?
|
| Another question I have is: why are you choosing a two-legged
| human over a four-legged one?
|
| My experiments with two legged robots were mostly bad. Not only
| did they fall basically all the time but they also had a big
| drift. So far, I have not seen any large improvements. But again,
| I might be very outdated.
|
| I always said to my colleagues. The main point stopping robots
| from picking up is a stable platform. And with the platform I
| mean walking.
| codekansas wrote:
| Eh. I think we got a bit nerd-sniped on some things and we
| ended up trying to build most of our stack ourselves. The
| control loop is just a pretty simple Rust loop for running ML
| models. ROS is kind of annoying to work with and the control
| loop is pretty simple so we just wrote it ourselves.
|
| For two legged - I think it will eventually be quite a bit
| cheaper, it's mostly a software problem to get them to be
| stable. RL based control has gotten much, much better. For
| example, I was talking to Trevor Blackwell a few weeks ago, and
| he was saying the IMU on the original Anybots robot was over
| $2k, whereas if you throw a noisy IMU into sim, you can get
| away with something basically from a cellphone. So yea,
| personally I'm a big believer in needing to solve the robotics
| intelligence problem, and once you solve that, humanoids will
| make the most sense as a form factor.
| harhargange wrote:
| Nothing against the company but I'm waiting for the tech to get
| backlash. I have a feeling people are going to want to end the
| techno autocracy and so-calledb advancements that go on to become
| weapons while people continue to go back to old ways and learn
| old skills that prove to more useful.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yeah I think humanoids are a pretty fraught area. There's
| definitely been some backlash but overall I have really
| appreciated the responses we've got from people. Like, I just
| want people to care about what we're doing - if positive that's
| great, if negative then we can learn how to do better. As long
| as people have an opinion one way or the other, I'm happy :)
| dbmikus wrote:
| This is awesome! How much of your team's time goes into working
| on the physical hardware, versus RL simulation environments,
| versus managing all the training data from the real robot and the
| simulations?
|
| I'm super interested in learning more about the training process
| of world and robotics model and the data challenges there.
| codekansas wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We're all pretty cross-stack - there are some hardware people
| and some software people, but the product is quite integrated.
| Personally, my time has been mostly focused on the RL stack
| recently, and after there are more robots in the wild, I
| suspect my time will transition to working on building this
| data feedback loop.
|
| I try to answer questions pretty actively on our Discord so
| happy to chat there about whatever you like
| dbmikus wrote:
| I'll hop in there!
| v5v3 wrote:
| >However, a lot of the people who want to buy a humanoid robot
| today do so because they want a completely autonomous robot to do
| all their chores,
|
| Not sure your research has been through.
|
| The ones that get the most attention from what I've seen are the
| ones that look female. And the first comment is always about how
| easy to clean...
|
| All those lonely men spending thousands on the billion dollar
| revenue generating onlyfans and webcam sites seem to be the
| immediate consumer market.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yes, we are aware of this customer segment. I don't think they
| have thoroughly considered the implications of what high torque
| actuators can do to the human body
| beau_g wrote:
| Every technological leap has it's Chuck Yeagers and Yuri
| Gagarins that will put it all on the line with early tech for
| humanity to take that next step - we have to accept the
| inevitable and hope that luck is on these brave soul's side
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You might have a significant portion of those customers that
| are into that
| nativeit wrote:
| Castration via motorized actuator? Pretty niche kink, I'd
| say.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| cheaper than getting bottom surgery
| dchuk wrote:
| Your build guide link is a 404
| codekansas wrote:
| Which link? I can fix
| swyx wrote:
| congrats! just sharing also the behind the scenes talk that one
| of your engineers did at AIE:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS92RdBvI90
| markisus wrote:
| Congrats on the launch!
|
| Your current market seems to be "niche toys for rich tech people"
| and the future market seems very uncertain. I am impressed that
| you were able to get funding for this idea. How do you get around
| the "solution in search of a problem (SISP)" objection from VCs?
| In fact, your founding story indicates that you just liked the
| technology meaning you had to work backwards to find the business
| case.
|
| I'm asking because I think many of us would like to get funding
| for ventures in areas of technology that we are passionate about,
| but for which the future market potential remains extremely
| speculative. How do you do it?
| codekansas wrote:
| I have a pretty bad mental model of how most VCs think, but I
| think good VCs will fund smart people who demonstrate extreme
| conviction, regardless of how they initially size the market.
| The opportunity cost for me doing K-Scale is making quite a bit
| of money at Tesla or Meta, so assuming I am not acting
| irrationally, either I have extreme conviction or I am a
| masochist. In my experience, VCs are pretty bad at telling the
| difference.
| gspetr wrote:
| I'd say if you have a marketing problem do whatever the heck
| you can to get Rory Sutherland to take a look at your
| product, the man is a force of nature when it comes to
| unconventional marketing and from him I've learned the
| crucial distinction between relational and transactional
| capitalism.
|
| And if you ever make it to the (multi)unicorn status because
| of him, don't forget yours truly. :)
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| My friend and I are so excited about this bot that we're actively
| looking for AI grants to apply to for funding the purchase! The
| price is incredible for what you get, but we both work in the
| public sector :/
| codekansas wrote:
| We're exploring some options - maybe a rental option in the
| future. Would like to make it accessible to everyone
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Consider the ROS simulators first, and look at the platforms
| used in RoboCup events. There are better platforms than Talos
| or HECTOR around.
|
| It can take years to get a basic bipedal platform operational,
| and in general it takes 3 times as long to tune the
| software/firmware. Unless you see actual proof of platform
| operation for more than a minute, than take any claims as
| marketing hype.
|
| Could also try a cheap servo hexapod or turtle-bot kit first,
| as stable well-studied platforms are easier to code on. =3
| lucubratory wrote:
| Hey, just chiming in to say that I think this project is really
| cool even though it's outside the price range of what I can spend
| on a cool hobby.
|
| I'm disabled, and one thing I'm really interested in long-term
| for humanoid robots is disability support work. Disability
| support work involves a huge variety of individual tasks, as many
| as a typical person will do in their life, so it's a good fit for
| an extremely general platform like a humanoid robot. Motorised
| wheelchairs and dishwashers exist, but a support worker might
| need to push a wheelchair, do sensitive dishes, do laundry,
| accurately open and place medications without destroying them,
| weigh & dose powders, help someone with going to the toilet, cook
| meals, drive a car, control pets, manage the level of
| noise/light/smells in the environment to stop someone from being
| overwhelmed, sanitise surfaces including themselves, navigate
| confusing interfaces on a phone or computer, help someone drink
| from a bottle, remember what sort of activities helped a disabled
| person in the past to be able to do them in the future, help
| someone with physical fitness activities like punching or kicking
| a pad, talk to people for someone, carry someone safely in the
| event of an emergency, make coffee in the morning, monitor intake
| of various drugs/nutrients/macronutrients, be able to reach and
| catch someone before they hit the floor if they pass out, help
| someone walk if they're unsteady on their feet, etc etc. It makes
| sense to me that it would be cost effective to have one platform
| which can do all of that with similar performance to a human,
| rather than automating many of those tasks individually in ways
| that might not be accessible to some disabled people.
|
| In terms of TAM, absolutely huge amounts of money are spent on
| disability care (keeping in mind that elder care is also
| disability care), by both governments and private citizens, and
| this number is forecasted to continue growing as more people
| become disabled by COVID-19 and demographic changes increase the
| elderly population relative to working age adults. As well, there
| are constantly scandals about how bad conditions are in some area
| of disability care, almost always due to underpaid, untrained, or
| unmonitored staff, so there's a lot of demand for both more
| reliable quality & lower prices; that demand is only going to
| grow with time. Various government bodies are very large sources
| of funding that are very concerned with value for money and would
| pursue any option that could do the job without costing as much -
| in my country (Australia), there's the NDIS, National Disability
| Insurance Scheme. They are always looking for ways to consolidate
| care for less money.
|
| I strongly suspect that any humanoid robot which was good enough
| to do disability support work would be in extremely high demand
| in the general population for obvious reasons, as well as being
| useful as a platform for labour automation, but those are much
| more speculative. Disability support work is a lot of money for
| incredibly varied tasks being spent right now. Something to think
| about.
| codekansas wrote:
| This is really interesting to read about. To be honest, I know
| very little about this space, but it's something a few people
| have approached me about tackling.
|
| I do think that this is a great application of a general
| purpose robot. I'm not sure what the technical timeline will
| be, but it would certainly be cool for my parents to have such
| a robot when they are elderly.
| lucubratory wrote:
| I spend a lot of time thinking about it day-to-day because of
| my disability and reliance on multiple disability support
| workers, as well as living with my husband who is also
| disabled, so if you ever wanted to talk to someone with
| disability support workers feel free to ask.
| andrewrn wrote:
| This, to me, is the most compelling and humane application of
| humanoids. Often I think people jump to humanoids taking jobs,
| but wow, it would be so incredible for elderly folks to have a
| humanoid that can help them.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| What ML algorithms do you intend for full autonomy? Multi Modal
| LLMs for planning that control the robot by generating s.th. like
| code? Or s.th. that requires more learning from the environment?
|
| When I click "get in touch" on your github I just land on the
| website where I can buy the robot. Building the hardware for an
| autonomous robot is orders of magnitudes easier than the control.
| Do you think anyone with the capability do develop an autonomus
| robot will buy this and then just give you the code because its
| open source?
| codekansas wrote:
| My overall plan is basic joystick control -> VLA with RL ->
| self-supervised embodied representation -> end-to-end RL ->
| end-to-end control. I suspect there will be some very good
| multi modal models coming out in the next few years which we
| might use as base models, although more likely, we will adapt
| their techniques to work on data from our own robot.
|
| I agree that the hardware is easier than the software - I am a
| software guy, personally, but I felt that it was important to
| do the hardware first so at least we can have a baseline
| product which we can offer to people. I would personally like
| to work on this software problem (or rather, build a company to
| work on this problem), and this seems like the right way to go
| about funding working on this problem.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| I like the K-Sim Gym. Im looking forward to fiddle with it a
| bit when I have more time. I could see that you get something
| usefull out of people competing on your leaderboard xD
|
| It's my hot take that the next big ML breakthrough needs
| s.th. that learns from its own actions in an environment, so
| this goes in the right direction imo.
|
| On the other hand a lot of big companies struggle with self
| driving cars even though they predicted to build this years
| ago. Also probably all big AI companies work on AI for
| autonomous robots. Where do you intend to do s.th. different
| to get a shot at competing with them (when they have so much
| more capital)?
| codekansas wrote:
| I really do think that building through the open source
| community is the best way to compete with the big players,
| even without having a lot of capital. Of course, it doesn't
| mean we can't execute well, but I do think it's a good way
| to make a lot of progress without spending a lot of money.
| dan344 wrote:
| So the non full autonomy would mean little software upgrades?
| More do it yourself?
|
| Also, what's the different bt the computes: like what's the
| onboard computer running (the 2 options)?
|
| Thanks.
| codekansas wrote:
| Yeah, the basic robot is just a robot, albeit with open-source
| software and hardware
|
| For compute - we're exploring a few boards right now, but the
| base model will be something from Amlogic and the higher end
| model will be something from Nvidia
| dan344 wrote:
| nice! For manipulation taskes, is kscale planning to train in
| sim mostly and transferring to real, or is some imitation
| learning used, like with gloves and such? maybe both?
|
| Appreciate it
| codekansas wrote:
| I think we will just focus on making really great, low-cost
| hardware and a nice SDK, and let other people experiment
| with different approaches on the intelligence layer.
| accurrent wrote:
| How do you plan on competing with existing Chinese manufacturers.
| Unitree for instance sells there robots at a reasonable price and
| already has walking working.
| codekansas wrote:
| Well, I believe the competition up until now has mostly been on
| hardware, but moving forward it will mostly be in software. I
| don't think we will be outcompeted by Unitree on software. And
| I hope to capitalize on our engagement with the open source
| community in a way that Unitree has not.
| alexnewman wrote:
| I'm so glad I sent them a check asap. Super proud that there's
| georgia (as in 404) in the founder crew
| codekansas wrote:
| Really appreciate it :)
| ecesena wrote:
| Is there any doc on the hand? It looks surprisingly cheap.
| codekansas wrote:
| We try to sell it for a fair price while still making money.
| Actually I think there will be comparably priced humanoids
| coming out from other companies soon
| ecesena wrote:
| Sorry maybe I should have been more specific. I had Unitree
| in mind, last time I checked the humanoid with no hands was
| $20k and each hand was an extra $20k. Yours seems to ship
| with 2 hands for extra $1k (surprisingly cheap, which is
| great of course!). I was curious to read more about what the
| hands are capable of doing.
| codekansas wrote:
| Oh I see. Yes, we're currently exploring a few different
| five finger hand options - we will choose whichever option
| provides the best value. I actually quite like the Inspire
| hands and we might be able to get a volume discount
| rkagerer wrote:
| I appreciate the humility in your videos, good luck with the
| launch!
| nativeit wrote:
| I give you a lot of credit for your communication and openness. I
| am afraid full-autonomy is a fairy tale to rationalize the
| ungodly expense of LLMs, I personally would find taking money on
| spec for something like fully autonomous robotics to be a little
| shaky, ethically speaking. But then, I don't believe this is an
| unsolved problem, I believe this is an unsolvable problem, so
| more of a philosophical difference than an empirical position at
| this point.
| codekansas wrote:
| I think it's a very hard problem, but I would like to align our
| company's incentives towards solving it
| smaudet wrote:
| Great. Another problem for us to solve, how defend ourselves
| from your robots.
|
| Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Cool.
|
| But this looks like an expensive toy.
|
| The stuff of nightmares is this being adapted by the DoD. I can
| almost imagine your website as a scene in the prologue of a
| terminator like movie.
|
| Nightmare 2 is this becomes a companion of some sort. Detroit
| Become Human goes into this. You have a theme of the robots
| basically wanting freedom. Which throws out a moral conundrum, if
| someone buys an AGI enabled bot just to be mean to it, have they
| done anything wrong.
|
| I like technology , but this feels like step one to a whole lot
| of weird stuff.
| codekansas wrote:
| I suspect that these kinds of things will happen with or
| without my involvement. Assuming that they do, I would rather
| that a good open source option exists
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| Aren't there ways to legally forbid reusing anything you made
| for war like purposes?
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| DoD has Boston Dynamics? I think this is like the Llama. Give
| everyone else a play.
| gspetr wrote:
| An early Terminator prototype is pretty much useless unless you
| can field an army of them all at once and use them as shock
| troops.
|
| As an infiltrator, it's worthless because it's not fooling
| anyone with its bizarre uncanny valley gait, and as an assassin
| either a drone swarm or human snipers are more efficient.
|
| While sturdier than a human, if drones can take out tanks
| they'll be able to take out Terminators as well.
| Falimonda wrote:
| As much as DoD might like expensive toys, they have better
| options than an open-source project.
| nwhnwh wrote:
| "The first step towards a fully autonomous future."
|
| Sounds like a very sad life.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-04 23:01 UTC)