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223 points codekansas | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.395s | source

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!

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lucubratory ◴[] No.44459558[source]
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.

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codekansas ◴[] No.44459812[source]
This is really interesting to read about. To be honest, I know very little about this space, but it's something a few people have approached me about tackling.

I do think that this is a great application of a general purpose robot. I'm not sure what the technical timeline will be, but it would certainly be cool for my parents to have such a robot when they are elderly.

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1. lucubratory ◴[] No.44460111[source]
I spend a lot of time thinking about it day-to-day because of my disability and reliance on multiple disability support workers, as well as living with my husband who is also disabled, so if you ever wanted to talk to someone with disability support workers feel free to ask.