codekansas

7 ms·

31.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 mos
32.
by codekansas 1y ago
Tao Motors reached out to us about a month ago after our soft launch because they just bought a big factory in Texas to manufacture golf karts, and the supply chain for golf karts and humanoids is actually pretty similar. Their subsidiary i
33.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
34.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
35.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 h
36.
by codekansas 1y ago
Longer legs means more inertia on the actuators, which means bigger actuators + bigger battery, which means heavier robot, which means...
37.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
38.
by codekansas 1y ago
> 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 thei
39.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
40.
by codekansas 1y ago
Oh thank you! Will fix
41.
by codekansas 1y ago
We do! https://bounties.kscale.dev/ We haven't updated it much but it's a good starter point
42.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 dist
43.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 sett
44.
Launch HN: K-Scale Labs (YC W24) – Open-Source Humanoid Robots
233 points by codekansas 1y ago|95 comments
45.
by codekansas 1y ago
This is super cool! What have been your favorite and least favorite things about open source robots?
46.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 qui
47.
by codekansas 1y ago
Yes, we plan to release the hardware spec shortly! We have only properly released our software stack so far
48.
by codekansas 1y ago
Noted, will add!
49.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
50.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 thi
51.
by codekansas 1y ago
Yeah, Unitree SDK being such a marked-up price is frankly kind of antagonistic towards developers
52.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
53.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
54.
by codekansas 1y ago
Yes, our goal is to be Unitree-level but US-based so we don't have tariff issues
55.
by codekansas 1y ago
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-0
56.
by codekansas 1y ago
Awesome! Would love to chat, here's my email: ben@kscale.dev
57.
by codekansas 1y ago
Show HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44022106
58.
by codekansas 1y ago
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 mak
59.
by codekansas 1y ago
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
60.
by codekansas 1y ago
Well, designing RL rewards is the fun part. We can do it ourselves but I think that would defeat the purpose

More ›