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Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

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Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#31

Post by codekansas »

mhb_eng wrote: post #26
codekansas wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 understa…

Have you identified any limitations in current grippers based on lack of tactile sensing solutions to unlock truly dextrous manipulation?

Actually yea, the benefit of our parallel gripper is that we get some proprioceptive feedback which we can't get from the current 5 finger hand. I'm not sure how important this will be long term - I think vision can eventually mostly compensate if the ML models are good enough

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#32

Post by srameshc »

codekansas wrote: post #22
srameshc wrote: post #12

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 ?

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" fac…

Thanks for an honest response. I did some google search and I see that even a simple Robotic arm costs over $15, so K-Bot is at a good price point . If I have to invest purely for learning and trying to integrate with something like Gemini Robotics SDK, do you think it will work ?

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#33

Post by pj_mukh »

codekansas wrote: post #23
pj_mukh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazing, pretty nice list! Two quick suggestions: a) some of these definitely look they could be done without hardware or with light hardware support from a staff member? b) if you do a) and are open source completely I bet you don’t even need to do bounties. The increased participation could mean some great community generated solutions quick.

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!

That's fair, especially around firmware and things like OTA updates and lower level controls/safety you'd want to keep that closer to team.

But on the long-tail of autonomy options? Implementing the latest papers, trying cutting edge solutions, I bet a thriving open-source community could be very helpful ala PR2, given that the hardware is already open-source.

Nothing stopping you from picking and choosing from the various implementations to build into a streamlined product offering on the front end.

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#34

Post by iuhytgrfvecdsw »

codekansas wrote: post #22
srameshc wrote: post #12

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 ?

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" fac…

[dead]

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#35

Post by harhargange »

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.

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#36

Post by timhigins »

codekansas wrote: post #5
deepdarkforest wrote: post #4

> 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 so…

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…

> we're open sourcing everything

Does/will this include the training data, hyperparams, and weights for the models?

People will be reluctant to buy an "open source" robot if the key ML magic to make it work is closed off, e.g. if you charge a subscription for it.

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#37

Post by codekansas »

BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #28

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 t…

Eh. I think we got a bit nerd-sniped on some things and we ended up trying to build most of our stack ourselves. The control loop is just a pretty simple Rust loop for running ML models. ROS is kind of annoying to work with and the control loop is pretty simple so we just wrote it ourselves.

For two legged - I think it will eventually be quite a bit cheaper, it's mostly a software problem to get them to be stable. RL based control has gotten much, much better. For example, I was talking to Trevor Blackwell a few weeks ago, and he was saying the IMU on the original Anybots robot was over $2k, whereas if you throw a noisy IMU into sim, you can get away with something basically from a cellphone. So yea, personally I'm a big believer in needing to solve the robotics intelligence problem, and once you solve that, humanoids will make the most sense as a form factor.

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#38

Post by codekansas »

pj_mukh wrote: post #33
codekansas wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

That's fair, especially around firmware and things like OTA updates and lower level controls/safety you'd want to keep that closer to team. But on the long-tail of autonomy options? Implementing the latest papers, trying cutting edge solutions, I bet a thriving open-source community could be very helpful ala PR2, given that the hardware is already open-source. Nothing stopping you from picking and choosing from the v…

Yep I definitely agree. Our team is pretty small and bandwidth limited

I basically think our goal is to solve all the boring stuff and make it work reliably, so that other can people can try out the cool ML stuff more easily

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#39

Post by codekansas »

srameshc wrote: post #32
codekansas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" fac…

Thanks for an honest response. I did some google search and I see that even a simple Robotic arm costs over $15, so K-Bot is at a good price point . If I have to invest purely for learning and trying to integrate with something like Gemini Robotics SDK, do you think it will work ?

Yeah, this is exactly the kind of use case we intend to support. Basically, we want our robot to be the best mass-produced robot for this kind of experimentation.

Re: Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots

#40

Post by bbertelsen »

cpgxiii wrote: post #27
chrsw wrote: post #13

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 co…

Feet/ankles on humanoids are really hard mechanically. In many ways the kinematic requirements for the ankle are similar to a wrist, but while the wrist of a robot arm is the least-heavily-loaded, the ankle area can be the most heavily loaded. Humans get away with it by having most of the highly-stressed actuators in the lower leg, not the ankle itself, whereas many humanoid robots end up putting more of the actuator…

These are the kinds of comments that make comments worth reading. Thank you!
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