K-Scale Labs: Open-source humanoid robots, built for developers
29 comments
·May 18, 2025dang
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
Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022106
v9v
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?
codekansas
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#/
beau_g
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
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
awongh
It's cheaper than I would have expected. Are there other humanoid robots out there at this price?
Animats
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-...
codekansas
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.
throwaway7783
There is Unitree, runs on Ros. I saw a demo a few days back and looked capable. Hands need to be bought separately though
alex1115alex
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.
codekansas
Yeah, Unitree SDK being such a marked-up price is frankly kind of antagonistic towards developers
codekansas
Yes, our goal is to be Unitree-level but US-based so we don't have tariff issues
canvascritic
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
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
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
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.
rubitxxx5
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.
paulsutter
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
Awesome! Would love to chat, here's my email: ben@kscale.dev
whatever1
“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
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
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
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
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
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
codekansas
Well, designing RL rewards is the fun part. We can do it ourselves but I think that would defeat the purpose
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.