5 ms·

It seems like every consumer and industrial robotics company, with the exception of the drone makers, tends to run into trouble sooner rather than later - and i

by atroyn 11y ago

It seems like every consumer and industrial robotics company, with the exception of the drone makers, tends to run into trouble sooner rather than later - and it turns out being a division of Google doesn't help that much. Rethink Robotics for example had a great start, but soon ran into cultural issues and weaker than expected sales. iRobot has been unable to escape the vacuum cleaner market. KUKA and the other really big industrial robot manufactures have started doing new things with sensor-enabled manipulators, but the customers haven't exactly flocked. What is it about robotics that seems to run these companies off the rails? I worry about Fetch robotics hitting a similar barrier, despite having a pretty clear business case.

bsilvereagle 11y ago
> iRobot has been unable to escape the vacuum cleaner market. In the consumer space. iRobot has a healthy relationship with the Defense Department. http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx
- atroyn 11y ago
  That's true. In fact, it seems like cosying up to DoD is the only way for a robotics company to really get anywhere or stay afloat in the long run. This shouldn't be true, yet seems to be. Why?
  - adrianN 11y ago
    Robots are expensive and the DoD has nearly infinite funds?
    - atroyn 11y ago
      While it's true that DoD can allocate considerable funding, it seems strange that there is no other business model.
      - bitwize 11y ago
        The DoD abhors intelligence in robots. They need a machine that's just smart enough to do a specific job -- and no smarter. They're willing to pay for the smarts -- and may accept compromise for a solution that gets them most of the way there. That makes filling their orders easy compared to the consumer market, which wants mechanical butlers for cheap.
  - bsilvereagle 11y ago
    From my (probably naive) point of view, robotics sits on top of three pillars, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. To even get off the ground, you need strong people in each of the three pillars. Additionally, you need a leader who is sufficiently knowledgeable across all three pillars. Purely from an HR/talent acquisition perspective, this is difficult logistically and financially. Uber raided NREC to accomplish this, essentially creating a second headquarters, and paid quite a bit to get the talent. Then, you need a prototyping facility for both the ME/EEs. To start from scratch, a very hefty investment has to be made before product development has even begun. Then you're bleeding money through the product development phase (hopefully with some pre-sales, but odds are pretty low of this). After product development, you hit manufacturing, which is extremely difficult. Bolt.io has some good reading on this. To get to a product driving around, you've spent millions over the course of a year or two. To amortize that cost in a reasonable fashion, you've got to produce thousands of units. Fanuc took over manufacturing early on and was able to accomplish this, but for a lot of companies, the sales volume just isn't going to be there. The DoD, with SBIRs and other long term contracts, helps fund a lot of the product development, often provides you with a paying customer, etc. The risk and amount of monetary bleeding drops significantly as soon as you partner with the DoD.
    - Symmetry 11y ago
      I absolutely agree about CS and MechE but I my experience is that you can generally do just fine without anything cutting edge in terms of electrical engineering until you've grown a fair bit. Depending on what you're doing you might not need anything but off the shelf components like the hands we sell[1], the arms Universal Robotics sells, etc. Or if you're doing something more advanced it's probably using standard motors and ICs with a custom PCB. It's only when you're getting more advanced that you want more control of, e.g., the power system for production quality robots. [1] Shameless plug http://www.righthandrobotics.com/ http://www.righthandrobotics.com/
  - jlarocco 11y ago
    > That's true. In fact, it seems like cosying up to DoD is the only way for a robotics company to really get anywhere or stay afloat in the long run. This shouldn't be true, yet seems to be. Why? I don't see the problem with it. It's not like YCombinator or other VCs are going to pay for years and years of research. The DoD can afford to throw money at robotics projects and fund the grunt work of getting the technology developed. Spending a billion dollars researching and developing a walking robot or whatever is a great use of money if it means keeping a bunch of humans out of dangerous situations. For everybody else it's a cool idea, but not useful enough that they'd pay for it. Better to let DoD pay for it, and wait until that technology makes it into other products.
  - Qworg 11y ago
    The vast majority of robots are solutions looking for problems. The problems in the DoD are both pressing and obvious, making this problem show up less often.
pj_mukh 11y ago
Savioke and Fetch have it right. Solve small problems before moving on to bigger ones. The other robotics companies are simply realizing that now. Alphabet doesn't need to, they are attempting to reach perfection in a void. All the power to them!
ghaff 11y ago
I suspect that in the consumer space specifically there aren't a lot of obvious tasks that are amenable to being done by robots. Vacuuming is one of the obvious ones--which is why we have Roomba etc.--but even that requires fairly specific types of layouts. Laundry, cooking, loading and putting away dishes, general cleanup. We have appliances to help with some of that and we can buy, say, food that's prepped to a greater or lesser degree. However, pretty much none of those are things that one can imagine a practical consumer robot doing.
- ganeumann 11y ago
  I would buy a robot that could fold clothes, but that turns out to be a really hard problem (http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-robots-still-cant-fold-your-laundry-1424835003 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-robots-still-cant-fold-your-..., although there seems to be some progress in the lab: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11922590/Worlds-first-laundry-folding-robot-unveiled-in-Japan.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1192259...)
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Well, and for most people, it's not even really a "folding clothes problem." It's take everything upstairs. Put these socks in that drawer. Hang this shirt on that closet. Hang or fold these pants and put them in the right place. Repeat for each item. It's actually a move a lot of things around the house and put them away in the right way in the right place problem. Oh, and do it cheaply, because very few people are going to pay thousands of dollars for your put clothes away robot.
Symmetry 11y ago
There is Kiva systems. Their non-Amazon customers are sad but I think it would be fair to call the company a big success. I think that the warehouse logistics market is going to go big over the next 5 years. But of course I'm in a startup targeting that space so I better think that.
- atroyn 11y ago
  Kiva really seems to be the anomaly - and afterward, Raffaello D'Andrea went off to be a professor (though he has some new companies in the works to do with drones).
  - pj_mukh 11y ago
    But their business model was proven and others have followed suit with arguably more impressive technology (http://clearpathrobotics.com/ http://clearpathrobotics.com/)
gwern 11y ago
If you take a US perspective, perhaps, but globally, there are other bright spots. For example, after reading about iRobot's struggles to get permission for its wireless lawnmower robots, I was surprised to look into it and discover there were a fair number of lawnmower robot manufacturers for both large and small suburban scale robots which reportedly work well and are rather popular in the EU. Smaller lawns and higher labor costs speculated to be why. (I liked the idea, but after calculating how big our property was, only the most expensive commercial lawnmower robot reached parity with our John Deere Z-track riding lawn mower's capabilities, and the payback period was implausibly long, so I'm stuck doing the mowing myself. For now.)
- atroyn 11y ago
  I believe a lot of the autonomous mowers also require you to lay a guidewire around the boundary of your property.
  - Qworg 11y ago
    There are a few that don't, but they require your lawn boundary to be fully enclosed. They bump off the barriers to know to turn around.
- ghaff 11y ago
  I did look into this briefly, but even though I only keep a fairly modest portion of my property as a lawn, I'd still probably be looking at close to $3K, which would be about a 4-year payback relative to my lawn service--which also does some weed whacking and mows some small patches that aren't really connected to the rest of the lawn. Laying the guidewire would also be a pain. But I can see the attraction if someone had a smallish lawn--especially if they didn't already have a lawn mower. It would be just one more task they wouldn't have to think about.
  - Qworg 11y ago
    It is pretty magical having one - it is almost like the lawn never grows after it reaches a certain height. Also, the neighbors love asking questions about it.

by atroyn 11y ago

bsilvereagle 11y ago

> iRobot has been unable to escape the vacuum cleaner market. In the consumer space. iRobot has a healthy relationship with the Defense Department. http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx http://www.irobot.com/For-Defense-and-Security.aspx

atroyn 11y ago
That's true. In fact, it seems like cosying up to DoD is the only way for a robotics company to really get anywhere or stay afloat in the long run. This shouldn't be true, yet seems to be. Why?
- adrianN 11y ago
  Robots are expensive and the DoD has nearly infinite funds?
  - atroyn 11y ago
    While it's true that DoD can allocate considerable funding, it seems strange that there is no other business model.
    - bitwize 11y ago
      The DoD abhors intelligence in robots. They need a machine that's just smart enough to do a specific job -- and no smarter. They're willing to pay for the smarts -- and may accept compromise for a solution that gets them most of the way there. That makes filling their orders easy compared to the consumer market, which wants mechanical butlers for cheap.
- bsilvereagle 11y ago
  From my (probably naive) point of view, robotics sits on top of three pillars, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. To even get off the ground, you need strong people in each of the three pillars. Additionally, you need a leader who is sufficiently knowledgeable across all three pillars. Purely from an HR/talent acquisition perspective, this is difficult logistically and financially. Uber raided NREC to accomplish this, essentially creating a second headquarters, and paid quite a bit to get the talent. Then, you need a prototyping facility for both the ME/EEs. To start from scratch, a very hefty investment has to be made before product development has even begun. Then you're bleeding money through the product development phase (hopefully with some pre-sales, but odds are pretty low of this). After product development, you hit manufacturing, which is extremely difficult. Bolt.io has some good reading on this. To get to a product driving around, you've spent millions over the course of a year or two. To amortize that cost in a reasonable fashion, you've got to produce thousands of units. Fanuc took over manufacturing early on and was able to accomplish this, but for a lot of companies, the sales volume just isn't going to be there. The DoD, with SBIRs and other long term contracts, helps fund a lot of the product development, often provides you with a paying customer, etc. The risk and amount of monetary bleeding drops significantly as soon as you partner with the DoD.
  - Symmetry 11y ago
    I absolutely agree about CS and MechE but I my experience is that you can generally do just fine without anything cutting edge in terms of electrical engineering until you've grown a fair bit. Depending on what you're doing you might not need anything but off the shelf components like the hands we sell[1], the arms Universal Robotics sells, etc. Or if you're doing something more advanced it's probably using standard motors and ICs with a custom PCB. It's only when you're getting more advanced that you want more control of, e.g., the power system for production quality robots. [1] Shameless plug http://www.righthandrobotics.com/ http://www.righthandrobotics.com/
- jlarocco 11y ago
  > That's true. In fact, it seems like cosying up to DoD is the only way for a robotics company to really get anywhere or stay afloat in the long run. This shouldn't be true, yet seems to be. Why? I don't see the problem with it. It's not like YCombinator or other VCs are going to pay for years and years of research. The DoD can afford to throw money at robotics projects and fund the grunt work of getting the technology developed. Spending a billion dollars researching and developing a walking robot or whatever is a great use of money if it means keeping a bunch of humans out of dangerous situations. For everybody else it's a cool idea, but not useful enough that they'd pay for it. Better to let DoD pay for it, and wait until that technology makes it into other products.
- Qworg 11y ago
  The vast majority of robots are solutions looking for problems. The problems in the DoD are both pressing and obvious, making this problem show up less often.

pj_mukh 11y ago

Savioke and Fetch have it right. Solve small problems before moving on to bigger ones. The other robotics companies are simply realizing that now. Alphabet doesn't need to, they are attempting to reach perfection in a void. All the power to them!

ghaff 11y ago

I suspect that in the consumer space specifically there aren't a lot of obvious tasks that are amenable to being done by robots. Vacuuming is one of the obvious ones--which is why we have Roomba etc.--but even that requires fairly specific types of layouts. Laundry, cooking, loading and putting away dishes, general cleanup. We have appliances to help with some of that and we can buy, say, food that's prepped to a greater or lesser degree. However, pretty much none of those are things that one can imagine a practical consumer robot doing.

ganeumann 11y ago
I would buy a robot that could fold clothes, but that turns out to be a really hard problem (http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-robots-still-cant-fold-your-laundry-1424835003 http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-robots-still-cant-fold-your-..., although there seems to be some progress in the lab: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11922590/Worlds-first-laundry-folding-robot-unveiled-in-Japan.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1192259...)
- ghaff 11y ago
  Well, and for most people, it's not even really a "folding clothes problem." It's take everything upstairs. Put these socks in that drawer. Hang this shirt on that closet. Hang or fold these pants and put them in the right place. Repeat for each item. It's actually a move a lot of things around the house and put them away in the right way in the right place problem. Oh, and do it cheaply, because very few people are going to pay thousands of dollars for your put clothes away robot.

Symmetry 11y ago

There is Kiva systems. Their non-Amazon customers are sad but I think it would be fair to call the company a big success. I think that the warehouse logistics market is going to go big over the next 5 years. But of course I'm in a startup targeting that space so I better think that.

atroyn 11y ago
Kiva really seems to be the anomaly - and afterward, Raffaello D'Andrea went off to be a professor (though he has some new companies in the works to do with drones).
- pj_mukh 11y ago
  But their business model was proven and others have followed suit with arguably more impressive technology (http://clearpathrobotics.com/ http://clearpathrobotics.com/)

gwern 11y ago

If you take a US perspective, perhaps, but globally, there are other bright spots. For example, after reading about iRobot's struggles to get permission for its wireless lawnmower robots, I was surprised to look into it and discover there were a fair number of lawnmower robot manufacturers for both large and small suburban scale robots which reportedly work well and are rather popular in the EU. Smaller lawns and higher labor costs speculated to be why. (I liked the idea, but after calculating how big our property was, only the most expensive commercial lawnmower robot reached parity with our John Deere Z-track riding lawn mower's capabilities, and the payback period was implausibly long, so I'm stuck doing the mowing myself. For now.)

atroyn 11y ago
I believe a lot of the autonomous mowers also require you to lay a guidewire around the boundary of your property.
- Qworg 11y ago
  There are a few that don't, but they require your lawn boundary to be fully enclosed. They bump off the barriers to know to turn around.
ghaff 11y ago
I did look into this briefly, but even though I only keep a fairly modest portion of my property as a lawn, I'd still probably be looking at close to $3K, which would be about a 4-year payback relative to my lawn service--which also does some weed whacking and mows some small patches that aren't really connected to the rest of the lawn. Laying the guidewire would also be a pain. But I can see the attraction if someone had a smallish lawn--especially if they didn't already have a lawn mower. It would be just one more task they wouldn't have to think about.
- Qworg 11y ago
  It is pretty magical having one - it is almost like the lawn never grows after it reaches a certain height. Also, the neighbors love asking questions about it.