AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Train and deploy your own open-source humanoid in Python
Hi HN, I’m Ben, founder of K-Scale Labs (YC W24). Last year, I wanted to buy a humanoid robot that I could hack on, but the few options for sale were either too expensive, proprietary, or had a limited SDK. We set out to build an affordable humanoid robot using off-the-shelf components that can be built and shipped today, capable of running modern machine learning models, and make it completely open-source for developers like me. Today, we’re releasing our reinforcement learning library and sim2real pipeline for people who want to train policies for humanoid robots. If you have a computer,…
K-Scale Labs provides an open-source platform for training and deploying humanoid robots using Python. The system includes a reinforcement learning library and sim2real pipeline that allows developers to train robot… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
Hi HN! Proud to share our open-source robot platform, Dobb·E, a home robot system that needs just 5 minutes of human teaching to learn new tasks. We've already taken Dobb·E to 10 different homes in New York, taught it 100+ tasks, and we are just getting started! I would love to hear your thoughts about this. Here are some more details, below (or see a Twitter thread with attached media: https://twitter.com/i/status/1729515379892826211 or https://nitter.net/i/status/1729515379892826211): We engineered Dobb·E to maximize efficiency, safety, and…
2023 · dobb-e.com · its alternatives →
- 2OR
Hi all, excited to share our latest work, OK-Robot, which is an open and modular framework to perform navigation and manipulation with a robot assistant in practically any homes without having to teach the robot anything new! You can simply unbox the target robot, install OK-Robot, give it a "scan" (think a 60 second iPhone video), and start asking the robot to move arbitrary things from A to B. We already tested it out in 10 home environments in New York city, and one environment each in Pittsburgh and Fremont. We based everything off of the current best machine learning models, and so…
2024 · ok-robot.github.io · its alternatives →
- 3EF
I’ve been building Echo (https://echo.tracerml.ai/), an experiment in making one AI system out of a pool of open-weight models rather than choosing a single model and using it for every task. It started with a simple experiment. I took a group of models, including GLM-5.2, Kimi K2.7 and others, and ran them on the same evaluations. Then I measured what would happen if, for each problem, you somehow knew in advance which models would be useful and how their outputs should be combined. That hypothetical system performed substantially better than any individual model in the pool.…
Jul 2026 · its alternatives →
- 4
Introducing Stack-chan, an open-source hardware robot designed with Fusion360 and Kicad that is easy to assemble and customize. With just 6 screws, you can easily put together the robot and add your own features using JavaScript with the Moddable SDK. Stack-chan is completely open-source and the design files, firmware and software are all available on GitHub repository (https://github.com/meganetaaan/stack-chan) . Give it a try and customize it to your needs. We'd love to see what you create and hear your feedback on this open-source project.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5IB
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple: - Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we…
2025 · tinytpu.com · its alternatives →
- 6
- 7
- 8
Zoo▲234A free, open-source playground for AI image models
2023 · zoo.replicate.dev · its alternatives →
- 9
Rigyd▲59Simulation-ready 3D assets for robotics simulation, at scale
May 2026 · rigyd.com · its alternatives →
- 10
NeuroBlock▲120No-code AI Lab: Train models, access datasets, run inference
Feb 2026 · neuro-block.com · its alternatives →
- 11MP
Hey, we’re Axel and Vignesh, cofounders of Innate (https://www.innate.bot/). We just launched MARS, a general-purpose robot with an open onboard agentic OS built on top of ROS2. Overview: https://youtu.be/GEOMYDXv6pE Control demo: https://youtu.be/_Cw5fGa8i3s Videos of autonomous use-cases: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-example-use-cases Quickstart: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-quick-start. Our last thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42451707 When we started we felt…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 12
Hi all — I'm Kel, VP of Platform at Fauna Robotics. We're coming out of stealth and shipping Sprout (Creator Edition) today: a developer-ready humanoid robot built to be safe, approachable, and capable. We set out to build Sprout because we believe robots belong around people. Too many humanoids still feel like heavy machinery that doesn't belong in human spaces, and even the “friendlier” ones force teams to spend their time rebuilding baseline hardware and software instead of real applications. Sprout is different: lightweight and soft-bodied (1.07m / 22.7kg), with compliant control +…
2014 · faunarobotics.com · its alternatives →
- 13
I worked on this applied Deep Reinforcement Learning course for the better part of 2021. I made a Datacamp course [0] before, and this served as my inspiration to make an applied Deep RL series. Normally, Deep RL courses teach a lot of mathematically involved theory. You get the practical applications near the end (if at all). I have tried to turn that on its head. In the top-down approach, you learn practical skills first, then go deeper later. This is much more fun. This course (the first in a planned multi-part series) shows how to use the Deep Reinforcement Learning framework RLlib to…
2022 · courses.dibya.online · its alternatives →
- 14
Cloud logging + visualization tools for robotic development
2020 · its alternatives →
- 15
- 16
I started building a couple of years ago because I found no easy existing solution to build Slack bots that can be composed from/organized into plugins. Existing libraries like Bolt make it pretty easy to develop Slack bots, but hard to organize and scale the code base of your bot. I was also missing some crucial features such as scheduling actions for your bot. So I wrote my own framework! I recently rewrote the complete framework to make use of asyncio and the newest Slack SDK Let me know what you think!
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Scale delivers proven data, evaluations, and outcomes to AI labs, governments, and the Fortune 500.
2019 · scale.ai · its alternatives →
- 18
RL-training an AI agent to RL-train AI agents. Contribute to Danau5tin/ai-trains-ai development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
- 20
Hi all! Sharing our latest work on Robot Utility Models: open source robot models for some useful tasks like door or drawer opening at ~90% success rate that should just work out of the box (given that you have a robot, of course.) Why is this exciting? The state of the art for robot learning thus far has been reliant on pre-training/fine-tuning paradigm: models are first trained on large datasets, then you bring it to your own environment, collect more data, and fine-tune the model on that data. This is not ideal if you want to make robots that work in every home out of the box of…
2024 · robotutilitymodels.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Graph Neural Networks with Keras and Tensorflow 2. - danielegrattarola/spektral
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22RO
From the post: Blossom is an open-source robot platform for human-robot interaction (HRI) research that I developed during my PhD. I’ve used Blossom for research in design, machine learning, and telepresence; others have made Blossoms for their own research purposes. I have continued working on “rebuilding” the entire platform: I redesigned the inner frame as a model kit, complete with Gunpla-inspired runners and instructions, and refactored the codebase as r0b0, a Python library for communicating between hardware peripherals and software applications. In preparation to present Blossom at…
2024 · msgtn.xyz · its alternatives →
- 23
We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I’ve spent the last few months building a deep learning engine completely from scratch in Python (using only math and random). What started as a basic linear algebra calculator project grew into a symbolic tensor system with autodiff, custom matrix ops, attention mechanisms, LayerNorm, GELU, and even a text generation demo trained on the Brown corpus. I'm still an undergrad, so my main goal is to deeply understand how deep learning actually works under the hood - gradients, attention, backpropagation, optimizers - by building it step-by-step with full visibility into everything, and without…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Dobb·E – towards home robots with an open-source platform alternatives
- OK-Robot: open, modular home robot framework for pick-and-drop anywhere alternatives
- Echo – Fable-level results at 1/3 the cost using open-weight models alternatives
- Stack-chan – Open-source companion robot easy to assemble and customize alternatives
- I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem alternatives
- Asimov 1 alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →