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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 tha

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).

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).