Show HN: Train and deploy your own open-source humanoid in Python

Hi HN, I’m Ben, founder of K-Scale Labs (YC W24).

Last year, I wanted to buy a humanoid robot that I could hack on, but the few options for sale were either too expensive, proprietary, or had a limited SDK. We set out to build an affordable humanoid robot using off-the-shelf components that can be built and shipped today, capable of running modern machine learning models, and make it completely open-source for developers like me.

Today, we’re releasing our reinforcement learning library and sim2real pipeline for people who want to train policies for humanoid robots.

If you have a computer, you can try out this pipeline in less than 5 minutes: https://github.com/kscalelabs/ksim-gym.

Or try on Colab: https://colab.research.google.com/github/kscalelabs/ksim-gym...

Getting started is as easy as:

  git clone https://github.com/kscalelabs/ksim-gym.git

  cd ksim-gym

  pip install -r requirements.txt

  python -m train

After training a model, you can send it to us and we will run it on one of our robots. We are building a benchmark for humanoid RL policies here: https://kscale.dev/benchmarks

—

Why does the world need another humanoid robot company?

In the last year, humanoids have gone from science fiction to a seeming inevitability, bringing huge investment in the hardware supply chain and machine learning methods for robotics. But watching the ecosystem unfold, I felt pretty pessimistic about where things were headed. Seeing lots of cool demos without something that I can actually buy, from companies that have raised huge sums of money, reminded me of the early days of self-driving cars. On top of that, I find the idea of a small handful of companies building humanoid robots to be pretty dystopian. Even today, we’re seeing consumer robots being sold with government-mandated backdoors. That is not the future that I want to live in.

To that end, our company has three long-term goals:

1. Ensure that the world’s best humanoid robots are white-box systems that anyone can program and audit 2. Create the infrastructure to radically simplify developer adoption of humanoid robots, paralleling CUDA for GPU programming or PyTorch for machine learning 3. Build an ecosystem to accelerate humanity’s transition to a post-scarcity Type 1 Kardashev civilization whose gains are maximally distributed

If you would like to support us, you can pre-order one of our robots. We plan to launch the first robots this summer and are heavily discounting the price for early customers who can help us safely iterate on deploying robots in the wild: https://shop.kscale.dev

Since we are focusing on creating a developer ecosystem, we would love to hear your thoughts and feedback about our current software and hardware stack:

- Is this exciting to you? What would make you want to start developing on a humanoid robot? - What form factor is the most interesting for you (in terms of height, reach, end effector, or other hardware considerations)? - As a customer, what software capabilities would you expect from a humanoid robot in order to buy it?

We would love your feedback!