This Open Source Legged Humanoid Robot is Available to Order at $8,000

Founded in 2024 by veterans of Meta, Tesla, and Boston Dynamics, K-Scale Labs has already released multiple robots at a steady clip. The Bay Area-based Y-Combinator graduate just announced its most ambitious offering, a full-size, legged humanoid.

K-Bot isn’t destined to compete with Agility, Figure, and the like for a spot on the factory floor – at least not directly. The robot is the latest addition to another growing trend: open source humanoids. In other words, this is a platform on which future industrial (and home) robots can be built.

French firm Hugging Face gave the community a major shot in the arm with last year’s Le Robot launch. The code repository has fostered a number of robotics hackathons and, more recently, open source humanoids, including those built by Hugging Face, along with recent acquisition, Pollen's, Reachy system.

Given the current political climate, the fact that K-Bot is both designed and built in the U.S. will no doubt appeal to many. While Unitree’s low cost humanoids have made waves in research settings, potential backdoor exploits have left many institutes looking for alternatives.

K-Bot is also priced to move at $8,000 (add-ons like five-fingered hands will cost extra). Compare that to Unitree’s $20,000 G1 system and Researchy 2’s $70,000 price tag. Of course, both of those firms have been refining their commercially available systems for some time now, while K-Scale has effectively speed run its way into a legged humanoid.

The newer company’s system is being released in true DIY spirit, as an effort to build a community around bettering the product. K-Scale's site even features an autonomy timeline, as the company looks to build its capabilities beyond an existing tele-op interface. An initial platform release is pegged for November, featuring “Basic locomotion, balance control, voice commands, and app-based control with predefined command set.”

K-Scale plans to integrate a Vision-Language-Action model the following month, amid the great progress being made in the space from the likes of Google and Meta. Full autonomy, it seems, is a few years out. That end of the timeline always needs to be taken with a grain of salt, though the company has already recruited top talent for its Palo Alto HQ.

Per PitchBook, K-Scale has thus far raised a total of $1 million, split evenly between two rounds.

K-Bot is currently being limited to 100 units, with plans to start shipping in November.