Y Combinator’s Post

K-Scale Labs (YC W24) designed and built a fully-featured humanoid robot that anyone with a 3D printer and some time can build on their own. They're releasing a 4-foot humanoid robot named Stompy, complete with a claw gripper and designed for easy assembly on a 256 × 256 3D printer bed. Made from carbon fiber PAHT (though other strong plastics are also viable), it incorporates quasi-direct drive actuators for low-inertia, back-drivable joints with torque values ranging from 3-12 Nm. Each robot also features a hot-swappable 48V 15Ah battery pack, which can power it for over an hour. Alongside Stompy, they're providing an operating system that allows the robot to perform basic tasks and learn from experiences. Founder and CEO Benjamin Bolte is a robotics researcher and engineer with a background at Tesla and Meta AI, where he developed foundational models for robotics, including the voxel occupancy network for Tesla's Optimus and influential papers on speech and robotics at Meta, garnering over 2000 citations. Together with head of hardware Matt Freed and head of software Pawel Budzianowski, they're working towards a future where anyone with a few 3D printers and some scrappiness can start a robot factory, and anyone who wants a humanoid robot will be able to get one. Congrats to the team on the launch!