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I own a Panasonic Robot welding cell, and I keep up with numbers of robots sold like that - I know your numbers are correct. My experience with programming the
by gregpilling 10y ago
I own a Panasonic Robot welding cell, and I keep up with numbers of robots sold like that - I know your numbers are correct. My experience with programming the Panasonic is that there is quite a learning curve to get over, to do the most basic things with it. I think the small numbers of robot adoption could be a reflection on this difficulty, combined with high cost. My cell was $85,000. The robot was a great value at that price though, it generates about $2000 an hour worth of product. Paid for in 40 hours of welding, good for 10,000 more hours before its worn out.
The Baxter should prove me wrong, but I think it is just an underperforming platform. The current owners of robot tech would view it as under capable compared to arms from Kuka or Motoman or Panasonic etc. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8
I think the non-robot users, those companies getting a first robot, would find Baxter easy to use but would be less inclined to go buy one; getting a robot is a big step.
I have to think that ROS getting better and better, with offline programming, will help adoption. We are at the UNIX terminal phase of computing, or at best we are at a Windows 3.1 level. Nobody has made the iphone of robots yet, one that is very capable yet easy to program. Once we can get to a few swipes to get result, robot placement will increase rapidly. I love how repeatable the result is, and how fast it produces parts. It is about 3x more productive than my most productive welder, with equal or better accuracy (we still hand weld a lot of things)
Baxter was supposed to be the super easy to program robot, but he never seemed very precise in the videos, nor very fast (by design, but still - we buy these things to make money).
- beambot 10y agoKuka, the world's largest robot arm manufacturer, got acquired for $5B [1]. I'm not sure how that's a "small market." If Google believed in robotics (beyond autonomous cars), which seems to be the case given the acquisitions, then they need to start somewhere. Universal Robotics was demonstrably worth $300M with (what sounds like) a more-or-less similar product. That seems like a good place to start -- and all big unicorn products start somewhere; very few jump straight from $0 to $Billions. [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-midea-group-announces-bid-for-germanys-kuka-1463556160 http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-midea-group-announces-bid...
- sharemywin 10y agoGoogle's market cap $500+B so if they hit a home run their market cap will only go up 1-2%.
- beambot 10y agoUntil Google created AdWords, you could say the same about online search and sem ads too. All frontier markets start small and become big over time.
- gregpilling 10y agoOne of the biggest robot companies in the world, and its only worth $5 billion? Yes, it is a small market if that statement is true. Which is a shame. Kuka robots are amazing, and capable of welding together cars to being rides at Legoland. And yet, one of the premier robotics companies in the world is worth less than 10% of Uber. Robots are still hard to use, hopefully soon this will change. Then the market will get big. The robot arms are already precise enough, they need volume manufacturing to get cheaper.
- gallerdude 10y agoWhen we get the iPhone of robots, we're going to see a huge societal change.
- Animats 10y agoI've been waiting for the IBM PC or Apple II of robots for far too long, and it's still not here. It's frustrating. Robots just are not very general purpose yet.