codekansas

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.

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!

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.

Longer legs means more inertia on the actuators, which means bigger actuators + bigger battery, which means heavier robot, which means...

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

> 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 :)

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.

Oh thank you! Will fix

We do! https://bounties.kscale.dev/

We haven't updated it much but it's a good starter point

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.

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.

This is super cool! What have been your favorite and least favorite things about open source robots?

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.

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

Noted, will add!

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

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

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

Oh, because it will probably take a bit of time for us to get you a robot, if you want to try the software SDK, then you can try it now

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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#/