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!
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?
https://lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/ is only $5000. What's the extra $3000 get me?
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?
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 ?
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?
congrats! just sharing also the behind the scenes talk that one of your engineers did at AIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS92RdBvI90
> 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.
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?
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.
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?
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
I couldn't find any video if it walking in real world. Looking at mechanical design I'm suspect it cannot walk reliably no matter how much you train it in simulator.
>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.
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.
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 :/
I appreciate the humility in your videos, good luck with the launch!
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.
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.
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.
"The first step towards a fully autonomous future."
Sounds like a very sad life.
I'm so glad I sent them a check asap. Super proud that there's georgia (as in 404) in the founder crew
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.
Is there any doc on the hand? It looks surprisingly cheap.
Your build guide link is a 404
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.
Seems like the thing is entirely manufactured and mostly designed by a Chinese company?
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.