We do have an entirely 3D printable robot with build guide here, if you're interested: https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-bot-01#/
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-...
Looking forward to helping however we can
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"
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
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)?
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.
The tesla analogy makes sense to me but with a caveat: they still spend billions on CapEx and own verticals like battery chemistry and drivetrain design. In this case you’re betting that the value collapses upward into software, like the shift from phones to apps, but for that to work, your software has to deliver exponential delta per dollar
With that I think the real risk is that your "clean your house" package is deceptively hard in the long tail, and you will end up with the iRobot Roomba UX. Novelty fades fast when it constantly gets stuck under the couch or whatever the equivalent of that is for humanoids. To be fair iRobot/Roomba is a household name but still "only" a ~$1.5B company, which seems meager compared to ambitions in this space
As an aside I would love to see an RFC-style doc on how you think humanoid software standards should emerge. ROS is still a frankenstein, and someone needs to kill it gently lol
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.
whatever1•2h ago
But here you are asking from us, the talkers, to design your RL reward function.
breakyerself•2h ago
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•1h ago
bad_haircut72•52m ago
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2•2h ago
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•49m ago
[0] https://docs.kscale.dev/docs/zeroth-bot-01
codekansas•1h ago