alt.hn

5/18/2025 at 7:16:41 PM

K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for developers

 https://www.kscale.dev/

by rbanffy

5/19/2025 at 2:44:35 AM

A genuine intellectual question: what's driving the (hardware) cost of these humanoid robots? Dynamixel smart servo motors? Exotic sensors?

I do robotics research but not humanoid. Almost every component used in production came down drastically in price in recent years. Lidar sensors are a few hundred dollars now.

by quanto

5/19/2025 at 4:16:15 AM

Vast majority of BOM is actuators, although for low volume if you need to CNC a bunch of stuff that can hike the price as well. You can use exotic sensors but they're not particularly necessary. It's a death by a thousand cuts thing with many of the humanoids you see out there right now - hence our approach, which is to get the hardware cost down as much as we could and then start building the software to make up for it

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 6:02:25 AM

Not sure Dynamixel or other servo is a good choice for dynamic locomotion. In high end they use large brushless motors with minimum gear. Just look at latest dog and humanoid from Boston Dynamics or Chinese Unitree(?) and nonames. The reason is for dynamics it has to be fast and strong. For sensors they use gyro/accelerometer in the body as main. Advanced models use pressure sensors in feet. Looks like they are needed for precision acrobatics. And rotary encoders in all joints, of course.

by MoonGhost

5/19/2025 at 1:51:40 PM

The reason why you want quasi direct drive with low gear reduction has to do with the kinetic energy stored in the gears. It's difficult to get an intuition as a human, because we don't have rapidly spinning disks inside our arms.

The moment your high gear reduction actuator is forming a contact with anything, it will have to either decelerate instantly, push the object away or move into the object by deforming it. If your robot arm is moving at speed and hitting a wall, the deceleration needs to shed all velocity in a few milliseconds. This is fine for the arm itself, but if you have a 100:1 gear reduction ratio, one gear is moving at 100 times the speed of the robot arm and since kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2, the energy stored in the gear is significant. Stop the arm and you'll break off the teeth on your gears!

by imtringued

5/20/2025 at 12:03:39 AM

> Stop the arm and you'll break off the teeth on your gears!

Unless you have some energy dumping mechanism, like connect your servo to arm with flexible connector. Making whole arm or leg with bit flexible plastic will also reduce max load on gear. Precision will suffer, but should be still good enough for walk and house work. The problem with energy is that it should be undone when direction changes. This affects reaction time. And that time should be smaller for small, a... proportional to square root of size, right? That's how long it takes to fall. Not sure, didn't take into account the inertia of solid body.

BTW, heavily geared humanoid robots walk in some more stable way on bent legs. This is obvious on old videos. Like they are afraid to sh*t their pants. Also have problems with balance. Small hobby robots usually in addition to bent legs have huge feet. The point is, with servos it cannot be done much better.

by MoonGhost

5/19/2025 at 3:34:22 AM

Harmonic drive gearboxes are one thing, they had rust whole market locked up until recently I believe

by iancmceachern

5/18/2025 at 8:56:40 PM

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?

by v9v

5/18/2025 at 9:24:07 PM

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

by beau_g

5/18/2025 at 10:21:32 PM

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

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 9:24:19 PM

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

by paulsutter

5/18/2025 at 10:37:58 PM

Awesome! Would love to chat, here's my email: ben@kscale.dev

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 12:30:54 PM

Pretty cool. Once suggestion: any bot for home use (and many industrial uses) needs to be able to wash itself. No-one wants a bot that cleans the toilet and then gets dirt all round the house. This will be hard to retrofit (just covering it with silicone will give you massive thermal issues) so have a think about it early.

When I see a video of one of these things taking a shower, I'll think about buying it :-)

by ajb

5/19/2025 at 12:49:43 PM

What about having the frame be relatively open, ship the robot with a sort of temporary shelter and have some disinfectant spray? Basically to "shower" the robot, you cover it in the shelter, press a button, remove shelter. Like fumigating a house, but on a smaller scale.

Would that still be too manual? I guess you could have another robot do it for you/it :)

by diggan

5/19/2025 at 2:07:37 PM

I think that only works for rather specific cases, like if your robot is contaminated but not physically dirty. Usually people care about the mess of dirt as well. Also if the frame is open I suspect it will get grit etc inside.

Perhaps a more general way to put this is, think about having this bot in a house with a small child. It would need to clean itself after the kid gets it dirty, and it shouldn't stop working if the kid sticks a Lego brick in some gap.

These open framed robots are fine for development purposes, but for general use they don't seem practical.

by ajb

5/19/2025 at 9:33:57 AM

I'm quite interested in the Z-bot [1]. I assume the actuators are good enough to allow the robot to be mobile, but it's missing any information about the sensors, compute, battery, etc. It's difficult to know what you are getting into.

[1] https://shop.kscale.dev/products/zbot

by bArray

5/19/2025 at 6:32:04 PM

Yes, we plan to release the hardware spec shortly! We have only properly released our software stack so far

by codekansas

5/20/2025 at 3:16:11 PM

Any idea when that would be?

by bArray

5/18/2025 at 9:11:36 PM

It's cheaper than I would have expected. Are there other humanoid robots out there at this price?

by awongh

5/18/2025 at 11:14:48 PM

There are at least 18 humanoid robots far enough along to have YouTube videos.[1] That's from February 2024. As far as I can tell, none have an order page where you jut enter a credit card number and get the product. It's all "pre-order", "contact sales", or just plain vagueness.

There are a lot of "really great, real soon now" humanoid robot startups.[2][3] As far as I can tell, nobody has yet deployed one in a production environment.

On the mechanical engineering side, it's likely that a drone company will have the first big low-cost product. Drone companies have people who understand sensors, balance, navigation, reliability, and weight/cost/strength tradeoffs.

[1] https://james.darpinian.com/blog/you-havent-seen-these-real-...

[2] https://personainc.ai/

[3] https://gotokepler.com/

by Animats

5/18/2025 at 10:23:14 PM

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.

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 10:04:08 PM

There is Unitree, runs on Ros. I saw a demo a few days back and looked capable. Hands need to be bought separately though

by throwaway7783

5/19/2025 at 12:11:25 AM

The Unitree robots look great in videos, kind of suck in reality. The motors in the humanoid (G1) overheat after shaking hands a few times, and the wheeled dog (GO2W) drifts like a broken RC car and constantly topples over in motion.

They also patched the known jailbreak methods early this year, so all newer models lack sensor access unless you pay Unitree massive $$$ for SDK access.

The base Go2 is a fun toy, though. There’s a high level web SDK you can use for free.

by alex1115alex

5/19/2025 at 12:21:32 AM

Yeah, Unitree SDK being such a marked-up price is frankly kind of antagonistic towards developers

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 10:43:26 PM

Yes, our goal is to be Unitree-level but US-based so we don't have tariff issues

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 8:59:01 AM

This is really nice, but why humanoid? Spiders, dogs etc with human arm(s) and hands with thumbs etc seem to make a lot more sense. We can design whatever we want, why make them humanoid? Or at least 'ape', so it would crawl on all fours normally for stability and can stand up and use it's hands (and feet) for working on things.

by anonzzzies

5/19/2025 at 9:34:14 AM

The world is already human shaped. It's essentially backwards compatibility for existing physical interfaces.

by throwing_away

5/19/2025 at 10:45:16 AM

Sure but we can have something compatible while more stable: quadro etc that can stand on 2+ legs. So far I see the only actually practical robots in industry or at home not resembling humans in the slightest. Just the arms, if that.

by anonzzzies

5/19/2025 at 6:33:32 PM

Actually the main reason is that the supply chain for humanoid robots is maturing very quickly, and the price has dropped to the point a lot and will likely continue to drop. Also the machine learning methods for humanoids are improving quickly as well. So there's a lot of tailwinds for building humanoid robots.

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 2:14:59 PM

At a minimum it needs roller skates, wings and flippers

by pigeons

5/19/2025 at 2:18:47 AM

Ooooh, this is cool.

Just like reprap worked a treat, I hope initiatives like this bring experimental bots into people's workshops.

by fennecbutt

5/19/2025 at 3:11:49 AM

That's our goal! We want to get cool robots into people's hands sooner rather than later:)

by alihkw_

5/18/2025 at 10:18:35 PM

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"

by canvascritic

5/18/2025 at 10:31:57 PM

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

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 10:43:02 PM

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)?

by canvascritic

5/18/2025 at 10:48:09 PM

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.

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 11:05:01 PM

this all makes sense and is honestly the most coherent humanoid startup thesis i've seen outside of figure.ai. You're right that the unit economics of hardware are a trap unless you can commoditize the complements. And humanoid hardware clearly wants to become a commodity, but no one's finished the job yet and it seems brutally difficult (see: the ghost of Willow Garage)

The tesla analogy makes sense to me but with a caveat: they still spend billions on CapEx and own verticals like battery chemistry and drivetrain design. In this case you’re betting that the value collapses upward into software, like the shift from phones to apps, but for that to work, your software has to deliver exponential delta per dollar

With that I think the real risk is that your "clean your house" package is deceptively hard in the long tail, and you will end up with the iRobot Roomba UX. Novelty fades fast when it constantly gets stuck under the couch or whatever the equivalent of that is for humanoids. To be fair iRobot/Roomba is a household name but still "only" a ~$1.5B company, which seems meager compared to ambitions in this space

As an aside I would love to see an RFC-style doc on how you think humanoid software standards should emerge. ROS is still a frankenstein, and someone needs to kill it gently lol

by canvascritic

5/19/2025 at 5:44:50 AM

The dangerous failure mode for humanoid robots is that they get off-balance and the usual compensation mechanism fails, so now you have a heavy chunk of metal slamming down. You don't want to be at the bottom of a flight of stairs that a robot is walking on.

by yorwba

5/18/2025 at 11:05:17 PM

I disagree.

If I made ~15M USD/yr and was much younger, I’d strongly consider buying this, specifically because it seems wide open. Others will just buy it and won’t think about the cost, but they’ll probably consider the community. You can’t have community for something like this unless it’s open. If it’s open you’ll get early adopters which can help develop the community.

You must focus on making it better and cultivating a community first.

by rubitxxx5

5/19/2025 at 1:31:51 AM

You do not need 15M USD/year to buy our robots. With 15M USD you could get ~1666 Kbots, or ~15,015 Zbots.

For reference, for the current Kbot to be 10% of your annual income, you would need to make $90,000 a year. And we plan to drive the cost down much much lower for the hardware.

by alihkw_

5/19/2025 at 1:34:43 PM

I don’t think the original comment was about spending the entire $15M on your robots

by poopiokaka

5/19/2025 at 12:51:38 PM

Not sure I missed it somewhere else, but it doesn't seem to indicate what countries they ship to until right before payment, as many others do...

Seems they only ship to Canada, United Kingdom, USA and surprisingly France, but no other EU countries.

by diggan

5/18/2025 at 10:32:23 PM

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?

by dang

5/18/2025 at 10:33:42 PM

Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022106

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 2:39:59 AM

Thanks! I've put that link in the text at the top of the current thread, so people can read both.

by dang

5/19/2025 at 5:26:57 PM

Your youtube channel is not linked on the website. Also it woumd be nice to have an rss feed, and a newsletter

by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe

5/19/2025 at 6:30:31 PM

Noted, will add!

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 3:54:30 PM

Did you all partner with Seeed? They are advertising a liveatream tomorrow featuring your bot on YouTube

by iancmceachern

5/19/2025 at 12:46:01 AM

Went to one of their hackathons last year. I think there's a lot of potential in this idea - imagine a robot that can do your real life chores - but this isn't it. The robots don't know their own positions, so as soon as there's a bit of slippage in the actuators, the robot will start flailing on the floor.

by OsrsNeedsf2P

5/19/2025 at 1:21:51 AM

Kscale engineer here: I'm honestly not sure what you mean by "the robots don't know their own positions". We have 2 fish eye lens cameras on the K-Bot, and an IMU, which allow the robot to estimate its 3D position(s) quite well.

The actuators also have encoders that allow you to read all of the joint positions very precisely.

PS: If the last time you saw the robots was last year, we encourage you to visit us again! Kscale robots improve fast :)

by alihkw_

5/19/2025 at 12:43:33 PM

[dead]

by gitroom

5/18/2025 at 8:47:36 PM

“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.

by whatever1

5/18/2025 at 9:03:11 PM

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.

by breakyerself

5/18/2025 at 10:25:53 PM

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

by codekansas

5/19/2025 at 3:19:31 AM

If you can get this thing to fold laundry and do dishes then I'll buy one. I think laundry folding is going to be the most important home automation task. If you can get that working then most other tasks like picking up, sweeping, and mopping will be childs play.

by breakyerself

5/19/2025 at 4:17:50 AM

We're still a pretty tiny team, so the goal with building in the open is to make it possible to build an ecosystem of people who can collectively add these kinds of skills. We're going to do what we can but it's definitely a hard challenge

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 10:38:03 PM

If you're young and single why not. Love your passion. I shared a house with my old cofounders and it was great.

by bad_haircut72

5/18/2025 at 9:06:23 PM

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..

by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2

5/18/2025 at 10:40:49 PM

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

by codekansas

5/18/2025 at 10:24:00 PM

Well, designing RL rewards is the fun part. We can do it ourselves but I think that would defeat the purpose

by codekansas