Humanoid Robots

Rishabh Garg, Tesla Optimus — Challenges in High Performance Robotics Systems

Aug 25, 2025 · 12:43

Rishabh Garg, a robotics software engineer at Tesla, explains how unexpected robot behaviors often stem from software and hardware integration issues rather than the control policy itself. Using a toy CAN bus system, he demonstrates how communication delays at 1 Mbps can cause loop execution gaps, leading to jitter and stuttering motors. Solutions such as multithreaded pipelining and synchronization primitives can reduce cycle time but introduce new problems like missed messages and desynchronization. He highlights how logging to disk on a Raspberry Pi can freeze the robot for 30 ms, and how priority inversion in the Linux kernel can cause system dropouts for seconds. The episode delivers concrete techniques for diagnosing and resolving these real-time system challenges.

Your Personal Open-Source Humanoid Robot for $8,999 — JX Mo, K-Scale Labs

Jul 2, 2025 · 19:26

Jingxiang Mo, founding engineer at K-Scale Labs, introduces their open-source humanoid robots: the 5-foot K-Bot (pre-order for $8,999, delivered by October) and the 1.5-foot Z-Bot, both fully open-source from hardware to ML models. The K-Bot uses MIT CHiTA actuators, provides up to 250 TOPS compute, runs an RL-based whole-body controller trained with MJX in 1-2 hours, and offers a Python/Rust SDK (pip install kos) with a digital twin simulator for rapid development. Mo emphasizes modularity—swappable end-effectors and upgradable heads—and positions K-Scale as the first US consumer humanoid robotics company, targeting developers and households. The robots are significantly cheaper than competitors (Tesla Optimus at ~60K, Unitree at 40K) and include VR teleoperation, OTA software updates, and a bimonthly hackathon community.