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From my (probably naive) point of view, robotics sits on top of three pillars, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and computer science. To even ge

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/

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/