K-Scale Labs collapsed in late 2025. Open-source humanoid robotics lost its poster child. Now Menlo Research is filling that gap with the Asimov v1 DIY Humanoid Kit — a “Here Be Dragons” edition that ships as a box of parts and a build manual.
What You Get for $15K
The kit includes everything: structural frame, actuators, motors, sensors, wiring harnesses, assembly manual, and video walkthroughs. The robot stands 1.2m tall, weighs 35kg assembled, and packs 25 actuated degrees of freedom plus 2 passive toe joints. Each arm can curl ~15kg. The RSU ankle mechanism — a parallel linkage driven by two 36 Nm motors — handles pitch and roll simultaneously, which is unusual for a kit at this price.
Menlo says $15,000 is close to BOM cost. A $499 deposit holds your spot in the queue. Expect 50-100 hours of build time — think serious weekend project, not afternoon hobby.
ROS2 and Full Open-Source Stack
Everything is on GitHub (asimovinc/asimov-v0): CAD files, STEP files, simulation models, and firmware. The robot runs on ROS2, which means developers can programmatically control all 25+ joints, stream sensor data, and write custom behaviors through standard ROS2 topics and services. If you’ve built anything on ROS before, you already know the API.
The real draw for developers: this is hardware you can actually hack. Build a walking gait from scratch. Plug in your own vision stack. Train reinforcement learning policies in sim and deploy on real actuators. Menlo’s Discord gives you direct access to the engineering team.
Reddit r/robotics gave it 1,383 upvotes. Forbes ran a feature. After K-Scale’s implosion, the open-source humanoid community was looking for a new platform to rally around — Asimov v1 is it.
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