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I recently took a job with a robotics startup...it's a tough business to operate in with huge operating costs (compared to software), but I think there are a lo

I recently took a job with a robotics startup...it's a tough business to operate in with huge operating costs (compared to software), but I think there are a lot of opportunities yet untapped. The old Feynman saying "There's plenty of room at the bottom" is extremely true in robotics. There are markets where robots have been (profitably) in service for a decade or more, but they are big robots with extremely limited roles: An arm that lifts a door onto a car, a glorified cart that follows a yellow line around a warehouse or hospital or whatever, etc. The new generation of robots is human scale and has more flexibility built in. They deliver door-to-door/peer-to-peer, instead of along a fixed route. They carry small packages instead of a stack of boxes. They do inspections in places that aren't safe for humans. etc. Plenty of room for smaller, smarter, cheaper, robots. But, it is definitely a tough/expensive business to build in, and the market probably doesn't have room for at least half of the companies currently running on investor money.

blacksmith_tb 8y ago
> They deliver door-to-door/peer-to-peer... I like the idea of p2p delivery ("robot: take this saw I borrowed back over to my friend Joe"), but I think that's v2.0 of the package delivery bots which are in beta (or maybe alpha) right now, unless I'm missing out on something? Not to mention the legal implications of on-demand bots as drug mules or bomb delivery...
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  Sure, it's in the future, but it's not the distant future. The company I work with does P2P within a given environment. It has a map of the hotel/hospital where it works and can basically deliver anywhere on that map (barring stairs, and a few other limitations). It has no fixed routes, and is demand-driven. Someone calls it, drops in whatever needs to be delivered, and tells it where to go. It arrives, maybe calls the recipient to let them know it's at the door, and hands the delivery over, after verifying recipient identity. There are many companies doing this kind of thing in various environments. Doing it at the scale of a city, like calling an Uber/Lyft, is probably a few years out, at least. Maybe in major cities taking the place of bike couriers it'll come sooner, I dunno. "Not to mention the legal implications of on-demand bots as drug mules or bomb delivery..." UPS and FedEx and the USPS have that problem.
petra 8y ago
Why is building robots so much more expensive than software ? Software is complex. The main tools to create software cheaper are abstraction and reuse. Can't those be available to new robotics startups ? Is building a robot from standard components possible ? or using some sort of software based mechanical/robotic design tool, similar to the procedural modelling 3d graphic designers are starting to use ?
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  "Software is complex. The main tools to create software cheaper are abstraction and reuse." Robots have all of the software complexity (more software than most software startups I've been involved in), plus hardware complexity. Software doesn't have a supply chain to worry about. Software doesn't have to deal with an unknown environmental issue that makes the screen go black, or a vendor that started shipping you a different part while calling it the same part, or a sales pipeline that involves shipping around tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware and staff to set it up and demo it, etc. So, a software startup has to solve software problems. A robotics startup has to solve software problems on top of everything else. "Is building a robot from standard components possible?" Sure. Most robots in the market are mostly built from standard components with a few custom built bits for personality or to solve specific problems. "or using some sort of software based mechanical/robotic design tool, similar to the procedural model 3d graphic designers are starting to use?" Sure, there are tools for designing hardware. Robot companies use those tools. But, it doesn't make building and shipping out multi-thousand dollar devices as easy/cheap as shipping software.
- yingw787 8y ago
  I don't work in robotics, but from my electrical engineering degree, I could hazard a guess: - Software becomes much harder if you have to interface with hardware. You mess up software, you edit and then recompile/rerun. You mess up hardware, you need to buy a new copy of the hardware. Imagine if every time you wrote a bug or compiled a dependency with a bug, you need to pay $5 to somebody. If somebody else's software caused an error on a piece of critical hardware, your hardware may break too (e.g. car crash). And good hardware costs a ton of money. A Dynamixel servo costs something like $500, for a motor that's maybe 8 inches cubed or less, but if you use a cheap motor from China your precision over time will suck and software-based closed-feedback loops aren't as good as good hardware. So maybe you decide to do simulations, and you write a hardware emulator to load your software on. That costs a lot of money too, and doesn't and never will mimic hardware in all cases. - Software for robotics is pretty low-level. You may need to write drivers for special hardware you develop, or you may need to rewrite drivers if proprietary drivers don't do the job for some reason. Drivers are if not hard to write, then a long slog to write (I don't write drivers). You need to make sure your software is highly performant, lightweight, and fault-tolerant. Maybe you need a real-time operating system, or you need to fork the Linux kernel and rip out bits and pieces (I heard somewhere SpaceX does this for their avionics, because they didn't want to deal with an RTOS). There is no let-it-crash philosophy. There may be no concurrency abstractions that are performant enough besides threading/locking primitives. There's the added complexity of failover that you plan into your design. You can't live without any of these most likely, because otherwise your customers may not live at all. - By the time you master all the tools you need to build a successful robotics company, you haven't changed the system, the system has changed you. You accept the truth that good hardware is hard to make, good low-level software is hard to make, and great insurance plans are expensive. You're a Windows guy now because you use SolidWorks to design parts, and you can't be bothered to make a startup to rewrite SolidWorks for Linux because it's hard to get the physics/math background to reproduce even a part of SolidWork's functionality and user experience (which is a lot, CFD/FEA/etc). You deal with manufacturers who are perfectly happy with older tech because it works and because newer stuff always comes with risk. Your customers are enterprise Karens who shatter your roadmaps and don't care about your dreams. This is a (possibly inaccurate) tasting of why building a hardware company is hard. I have the highest respect for those who do.
stupidcar 8y ago
I think in the end, like most industries, robotics will end up being dominated by a handful of big firms. Each will have a mature hardware/software platform that is theoretically capable of building any a robot in any configuration you can imagine, but in practice the industry will settle on a handful of units with sizes and shapes that have proven themselves well suited to general purpose operation in a wide field of tasks. Most clients will standardise on a single vendor, and a particular unit and software pack, with limited customisation, and only Governments and very large companies will pay for completely bespoke robots. Innovation and investment will shift away from companies trying to build a whole robot of their own to innovating on a single component type that fits within one or more of the large vendors supply chains, or plugging into standard units at the hardware and/or software level.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  I think that's a reasonable assumption. Economies of scale apply to all hardware, and there are many roles that a given robot design could fulfill, given the right software. The mainframe market might be a reasonable predictive model to look at (where there were a handful of dominant players, a few software companies around them, and hordes of service contractors who maintained them and helped companies accomplish their goals with the hardware available), at least until general purpose robots get cheap enough to look more like PCs. They're getting pretty close to that already, though, so maybe we'll skip right over the mainframe stage and right into personal robotics. I dunno. Depends how fast prices come down...I don't think the pricing works the same as PCs, as there is no "Moore's law" equivalent for robotics components. The price trends downward, and performance trends upward, but not at a multiplicative rate. As it stands for now, though, robots doing complicated things are generally working as a team with computation in the cloud, so the PC "buy it and own it" model can't work. Robots, at least the kind that are doing real work, are purchased or leased as a hardware-plus-service bundle (again, kinda like mainframes).
jpm_sd 8y ago
Once a technologically advanced product becomes truly useful and reliable, it's not a "robot" anymore. It's a dishwasher. It does one thing and does it well. General purpose robots are fundamentally too expensive to be mass-market useful! Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company.
- Judgmentality 8y ago
  > Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company. So I have thought about this a lot, and I even started and failed an ambitious robotics company, and I feel like a good niche product that could make a profitable company is self-cleaning litter boxes. No, it won't be a multi-billion dollar company (at least not just with that product), but there is definitely a market for this and the current products are underwhelming. And technologically, it is about as approachable an unsolved robotics problem as you can find. Here's the competition. https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-automatic-cat-litter-box-but-we-dont-recommend-it/ https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-automatic-cat-litter-...
  - exolymph 8y ago
    Holy fuck, please. A good one of these would be great.
    - Judgmentality 8y ago
      It's just a kickstarter, but this might interest you. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petato/footloose-next-gen-automatic-and-health-tracking-c https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petato/footloose-next-g... There are a couple of other interesting designs as well that eliminate the cleaning aspect. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freshflip/fresh-flip-the-no-mess-no-smell-cat-litter-box https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freshflip/fresh-flip-th... I know that one got canceled, but they're going to relaunch. Apparently a backer pointed out a design flaw (my girlfriend backed this project and has already been refunded her pledge but plans to back them again when they relaunch). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boxscoop/boxscoop-20-the-worlds-fastest-cleaning-cat-litter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boxscoop/boxscoop-20-th... There are others as well. I have no affiliation with any of the projects/companies.

blacksmith_tb 8y ago

> They deliver door-to-door/peer-to-peer... I like the idea of p2p delivery ("robot: take this saw I borrowed back over to my friend Joe"), but I think that's v2.0 of the package delivery bots which are in beta (or maybe alpha) right now, unless I'm missing out on something? Not to mention the legal implications of on-demand bots as drug mules or bomb delivery...

SwellJoe 8y ago
Sure, it's in the future, but it's not the distant future. The company I work with does P2P within a given environment. It has a map of the hotel/hospital where it works and can basically deliver anywhere on that map (barring stairs, and a few other limitations). It has no fixed routes, and is demand-driven. Someone calls it, drops in whatever needs to be delivered, and tells it where to go. It arrives, maybe calls the recipient to let them know it's at the door, and hands the delivery over, after verifying recipient identity. There are many companies doing this kind of thing in various environments. Doing it at the scale of a city, like calling an Uber/Lyft, is probably a few years out, at least. Maybe in major cities taking the place of bike couriers it'll come sooner, I dunno. "Not to mention the legal implications of on-demand bots as drug mules or bomb delivery..." UPS and FedEx and the USPS have that problem.

petra 8y ago

Why is building robots so much more expensive than software ? Software is complex. The main tools to create software cheaper are abstraction and reuse. Can't those be available to new robotics startups ? Is building a robot from standard components possible ? or using some sort of software based mechanical/robotic design tool, similar to the procedural modelling 3d graphic designers are starting to use ?

SwellJoe 8y ago
"Software is complex. The main tools to create software cheaper are abstraction and reuse." Robots have all of the software complexity (more software than most software startups I've been involved in), plus hardware complexity. Software doesn't have a supply chain to worry about. Software doesn't have to deal with an unknown environmental issue that makes the screen go black, or a vendor that started shipping you a different part while calling it the same part, or a sales pipeline that involves shipping around tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware and staff to set it up and demo it, etc. So, a software startup has to solve software problems. A robotics startup has to solve software problems on top of everything else. "Is building a robot from standard components possible?" Sure. Most robots in the market are mostly built from standard components with a few custom built bits for personality or to solve specific problems. "or using some sort of software based mechanical/robotic design tool, similar to the procedural model 3d graphic designers are starting to use?" Sure, there are tools for designing hardware. Robot companies use those tools. But, it doesn't make building and shipping out multi-thousand dollar devices as easy/cheap as shipping software.
yingw787 8y ago
I don't work in robotics, but from my electrical engineering degree, I could hazard a guess: - Software becomes much harder if you have to interface with hardware. You mess up software, you edit and then recompile/rerun. You mess up hardware, you need to buy a new copy of the hardware. Imagine if every time you wrote a bug or compiled a dependency with a bug, you need to pay $5 to somebody. If somebody else's software caused an error on a piece of critical hardware, your hardware may break too (e.g. car crash). And good hardware costs a ton of money. A Dynamixel servo costs something like $500, for a motor that's maybe 8 inches cubed or less, but if you use a cheap motor from China your precision over time will suck and software-based closed-feedback loops aren't as good as good hardware. So maybe you decide to do simulations, and you write a hardware emulator to load your software on. That costs a lot of money too, and doesn't and never will mimic hardware in all cases. - Software for robotics is pretty low-level. You may need to write drivers for special hardware you develop, or you may need to rewrite drivers if proprietary drivers don't do the job for some reason. Drivers are if not hard to write, then a long slog to write (I don't write drivers). You need to make sure your software is highly performant, lightweight, and fault-tolerant. Maybe you need a real-time operating system, or you need to fork the Linux kernel and rip out bits and pieces (I heard somewhere SpaceX does this for their avionics, because they didn't want to deal with an RTOS). There is no let-it-crash philosophy. There may be no concurrency abstractions that are performant enough besides threading/locking primitives. There's the added complexity of failover that you plan into your design. You can't live without any of these most likely, because otherwise your customers may not live at all. - By the time you master all the tools you need to build a successful robotics company, you haven't changed the system, the system has changed you. You accept the truth that good hardware is hard to make, good low-level software is hard to make, and great insurance plans are expensive. You're a Windows guy now because you use SolidWorks to design parts, and you can't be bothered to make a startup to rewrite SolidWorks for Linux because it's hard to get the physics/math background to reproduce even a part of SolidWork's functionality and user experience (which is a lot, CFD/FEA/etc). You deal with manufacturers who are perfectly happy with older tech because it works and because newer stuff always comes with risk. Your customers are enterprise Karens who shatter your roadmaps and don't care about your dreams. This is a (possibly inaccurate) tasting of why building a hardware company is hard. I have the highest respect for those who do.

stupidcar 8y ago

I think in the end, like most industries, robotics will end up being dominated by a handful of big firms. Each will have a mature hardware/software platform that is theoretically capable of building any a robot in any configuration you can imagine, but in practice the industry will settle on a handful of units with sizes and shapes that have proven themselves well suited to general purpose operation in a wide field of tasks. Most clients will standardise on a single vendor, and a particular unit and software pack, with limited customisation, and only Governments and very large companies will pay for completely bespoke robots. Innovation and investment will shift away from companies trying to build a whole robot of their own to innovating on a single component type that fits within one or more of the large vendors supply chains, or plugging into standard units at the hardware and/or software level.

SwellJoe 8y ago
I think that's a reasonable assumption. Economies of scale apply to all hardware, and there are many roles that a given robot design could fulfill, given the right software. The mainframe market might be a reasonable predictive model to look at (where there were a handful of dominant players, a few software companies around them, and hordes of service contractors who maintained them and helped companies accomplish their goals with the hardware available), at least until general purpose robots get cheap enough to look more like PCs. They're getting pretty close to that already, though, so maybe we'll skip right over the mainframe stage and right into personal robotics. I dunno. Depends how fast prices come down...I don't think the pricing works the same as PCs, as there is no "Moore's law" equivalent for robotics components. The price trends downward, and performance trends upward, but not at a multiplicative rate. As it stands for now, though, robots doing complicated things are generally working as a team with computation in the cloud, so the PC "buy it and own it" model can't work. Robots, at least the kind that are doing real work, are purchased or leased as a hardware-plus-service bundle (again, kinda like mainframes).

jpm_sd 8y ago

Once a technologically advanced product becomes truly useful and reliable, it's not a "robot" anymore. It's a dishwasher. It does one thing and does it well. General purpose robots are fundamentally too expensive to be mass-market useful! Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company.

Judgmentality 8y ago
> Our goal as engineers should be to found the next dishwasher company, not the next robotics company. So I have thought about this a lot, and I even started and failed an ambitious robotics company, and I feel like a good niche product that could make a profitable company is self-cleaning litter boxes. No, it won't be a multi-billion dollar company (at least not just with that product), but there is definitely a market for this and the current products are underwhelming. And technologically, it is about as approachable an unsolved robotics problem as you can find. Here's the competition. https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-automatic-cat-litter-box-but-we-dont-recommend-it/ https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-automatic-cat-litter-...
- exolymph 8y ago
  Holy fuck, please. A good one of these would be great.
  - Judgmentality 8y ago
    It's just a kickstarter, but this might interest you. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petato/footloose-next-gen-automatic-and-health-tracking-c https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petato/footloose-next-g... There are a couple of other interesting designs as well that eliminate the cleaning aspect. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freshflip/fresh-flip-the-no-mess-no-smell-cat-litter-box https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freshflip/fresh-flip-th... I know that one got canceled, but they're going to relaunch. Apparently a backer pointed out a design flaw (my girlfriend backed this project and has already been refunded her pledge but plans to back them again when they relaunch). https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boxscoop/boxscoop-20-the-worlds-fastest-cleaning-cat-litter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/boxscoop/boxscoop-20-th... There are others as well. I have no affiliation with any of the projects/companies.