We’re building reliable, safe, low-cost, bi-manual manipulators (humanoids without legs) as a first step towards programmable labor too cheap to meter.
Modern software is frustratingly unreliable and littered with bugs. Dependencies are not dependable. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be. Instead of trying to write simple, correct software we are rapidly heading in the direction of simply doing away with code by replacing it with billions of inscrutable floating-point numbers.
We don’t have to live like this. zeroK labs is building a clean-slate software stack for robotics from the compiler on up that is compact enough that an individual developer can understand and control it completely. We’re also building our own hardware using off-the-shelf quasi-direct-drive actuators with custom firmware.
Our long-term goal is to radically enhance our individual agency by creating programmable labor too cheap to meter. Instead of delegating agency to unreliable humanoid robots by commanding them with vague instructions, we want to be able to precisely specify physical tasks and delegate them to reliable machines. We want full control like a real-world version of Factorio.
Rajesh Poddar