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Reach Robotics is closing
- jefft255 7y agoThey didn’t have a lot of money; 6.5M $ isn’t much to do robotics development. As someone else pointed out, consumer robotics is hard because shitty robots are still expensive for everyday users and are mostly useless toys.
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- nategri 7y agoI'm definitely an outsider but I get the distinct impression that starting a successful consumer robotics company is like 1000X harder than the baseline for other kinds of tech ventures.
- jpm_sd 7y agoUnfortunately the reason it's hard is because nobody wants these products. They don't do very much, they cost hundreds of dollars - where is the value?
- ackbar03 7y agoAgree, I feel like aside from the roomba maybe there hasn't really been a consumer bot useful for anything
- quaquaqua1 7y agoThere are some interesting developments in the food robotics space but they are almost entirely contained to the manufacturing and sometimes restaurant industries-- the issue is that few users can justify large capital expenditures for marginal "nifty" benefits like "it looks cool and saved me a few minutes"
- MegaButts 7y agoWhat are some of the cool developments in the food robotics space?
- de_watcher 7y agoCrab disassembler.
- candiodari 7y agoThis one ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdmIe6qVG6I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdmIe6qVG6I
- mc32 7y agoI wonder if the tech is mature enough to make an indoor flying-pest control robot. There is the salt pellet shooter to annihilate some indoor pests. There were attempts to make laser armed pest killers. Obviously even the salt pellet solution would be problematic if automated (say pest lands or is near your face or eyes). However, a robot which could attack a pest niche where pests are endemic could have a chance at success. Summer mosquitoes, Florida roaches, ants, stink bugs, etc.
- robotresearcher 7y agoHow many dollars did you spend this year on these problems?
- mc32 7y agoThe annual cost of a pest control contract is about $200. Now that’s for vermin as well, so it’s apples and oranges. But, something which will rid your house of flies and mosquitoes as they appear, I’d buy something in the few hundred dollars range because it’s more than a toy. It takes care of an annoyance just as a roomba does.
- xnyan 7y agoIt probably varies from where you live, a single visit alone would be around $200 where I live, you get a big price break for multiple visits, $50 a pop if you buy a years worth.
- robotresearcher 7y agoOK. Now how much robot does, or should, $200 a year buy you?
- xnyan 7y agoMonthly pest control services, in the US south at least, start around 50 bucks a month. It’s over used in my opinion but I also understand that fear of insects is deeply rooted in the minds of many people.
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- bluedino 7y agoYou’d think automated robots to clean carpets and hard floors, and mow lawns would be easy sales and easy technologically. But they can’t clean toilets.
- jonathankoren 7y agoI think you can buy an autonomous lawnmower, but I don’t know how effective it is. My roombas sadly haven’t replaced our normal vacuum. Of the three companies listed in this article two of them were (expensive) toy companies, and the third was a crappy Alexa clone. A Roomba solves a problem. Maybe not as well as we’d hope, but most of the time, it does a good enough job. Dishes and clothes can be cleaned mostly automatically. The other household tasks are hard to solve. I’m thinking dusting, taking the trash out, ferrying the clothes to and from the washer. Loading and unloading the dishwasher. I’d love to have something do these for me, but they’re very hard problems, and I don’t expect them to be solved in my lifetime. Until C-3PO becomes a consumer product, I don’t see this space making any money.
- mikepurvis 7y agoThey're also occasional problems. A typical household does 1-3 loads of dishes per day, and a few loads of laundry per week. The easy-to-automate parts of these tasks have already been automated, and now only the hardest/suckiest parts remain. Restaurants and hotels do dozens of loads of dishes and laundry every day, so that additional expense and complexity required to automated the final 10% of these tasks is much easier to justify. So if you want to build a machine the folds laundry, don't build something ridiculous like the Foldimate, build a machine that folds bedding for a hotel.
- stevekemp 7y agoIf you've got a child or two you might find you do laundry every day. We certainly do, although I appreciate using cloth diapers makes that more necessary than it might otherwise be. But yes, hotels, prisons, hospitals, and similar places would be the initial target-markets for anything laundry-related.
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- CamperBob2 7y ago- Mow my lawn. (Done, kind of expensive) - Weed the garden. (Done, or at least in progress) - Keep mice out of my garage (Not done, seems like an obvious application) - Clean my gutters (Likewise -- this alone is worth hundreds of dollars a year) - Keep my driveway free of leaves and debris (does anybody make a "Broomba"?) These are all applications that I'd pay for, and/or am already paying humans to do. I don't think generalized pest control via robotics is going to be workable, but certain specific pest problems like rodents seem like they would be easy to tackle.
- codesushi42 7y agoHardware is hard. And robotics is 10X as hard. Then make it a consumer product that no one needs. And snap, you're dead.
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- darkmighty 7y agoThe real world is expensive. Everyone has a smartphone in their pockets (and most a moderately powerful PC of some kind depending on region), where hundreds of hours of challenge and entertainment can be had for free (or a few dollars). A piece of hardware for entertainment costing hundreds of dollars would need to be absolutely unforgetable (or provide a very lengthy/rich progression) to compete realistically. I think either it needs to be an amazing teaching tool and/or have other useful capabilities (like merging a roomba/educational robot, or merging educational/house monitoring); or the cost needs to come way down for mass adoption. I believe both have future (my dream is widespread robotics within <$10).
- nomel 7y agoI want a robot, owned by my apartment complex, that I can schedule to pick up my trash. Getting it to come up the stairs shouldn't bee too hard, right?
- Aromasin 7y agoThat's not hard. The hard bit is adding capabilities for when people leave obstacles in the hallway, or little kids are running around and playing with it, or some arsehole decides to tip it over, or the bin is damaged, or is over filled, or isn't positioned correctly, or the dumping spot is full, or the stairs just got new carpet. The problems with consumer robotics rarely are to do with the actual mechanics. Most electrical undergrad degrees have a module where you program a robot to follow a line or course, and it's quite simple to do. The problems occur when you take it out of it's test environment and 'leave it to the elements' as it were.
- choonway 7y agoRobots have to beat domestic servants in cost / ease of use first. I'd say when that is achieved, the killer feature would be privacy.
- lacker 7y agoIn the US, every domestic robot is far, far cheaper than a domestic servant. The main problem is that domestic robots don’t handle any of the main chores, besides Roomba doing vacuuming.
- gooddadmike 7y agoHow about before robots doing chores maybe a whole house volume (TV's, Doorbell, Phones, Microwave) level control to keep kids asleep. There is a lot of simple improvements that could go a long way toward making everyday life better that could happen before domestic robots.
- fulafel 7y agoInteresting thought. So if as an employer you'd be paying €3k/month for a domestic servant, that would correspond to about a €100k cost for a robot. You can't get a robot that can do the same things at any price currently, but that's a bigger budget for the robot than a single function robot like Roomba gets.
- grizzles 7y agoYou can't build a business if you need 10-15 half baked assumptions/bets all to be true for it to succeed. Robotics startups need to internalize an attitude that consumer robotics will never be a thing. Of course they will, but the comparative ease of targeting industrial applications makes consumer robotics such a challenging path forward for a startup to take.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoI'm uncertain how much these things count as "robotics." From what I can tell, Jibo is only a robot in the same sense a Transformer toy is; conceptually it's just an Alexa with a couple of swivel joints. Mekamon looked like it had some impressively agile movements, so there was actual robotics there, but I don't think it did anything with them that you couldn't have done with an R/C truck or tank.
- HALtheWise 7y agoNotably, Jibo started before the Amazon Echo was announced, and their core bet that home voice assistants would be popular actually ended up being true. Unfortunately for them, they took so long to get to market and arrived at such a high price point that they still lost.
- taneq 7y agoAlso if your toy robot costs $300, your market isn't kids, it's geek parents who are well off enough to buy a toy robot. At which point you're better off charging Aibo prices because your sales volumes are going to be tiny. Anki recently learned the same lesson. People might pay $300 for a game console but they won't pay it for a single game. Even if your toy robot has half a dozen modes, it still only plays one game: 'toy robot'.
- fpvracing 7y agoPeople are buying consumer robots. We just call them drones.
- rubidium 7y ago
- lacker 7y agoI think the lowest hanging fruit in robotic household automation right now is folding laundry. An interface like, put your clothes in the in-basket and this device folds them. I could imagine a world where instead of washer and dryer, a nicely equipped house will have a washer, dryer, and folder. This is especially useful once you have kids. Anyway, email me if you’d be interested in building this :P
- lxe 7y agoLowest hanging fruits are high impact and low effort. Laundry folding is probably one of the highest hanging fruits out there for robotics.
- robotresearcher 7y agoIf the the lowest hanging fruit is a loosely structured hi-DOF dextrous manipulation task we gonna lose our shirts before we fold 'em. Laundry is the domestic equivalent of de-mining: the perfect robot task if it weren't for the technical and financial challenges. You have a laundry robot at home already and it does everything except folding for a reason. Here's a video of the state of the art not too long ago, using a $500K robot. Video is 50X speed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy5g33S0Gzo
- taneq 7y agoFolding laundry is incredibly hard. The lowest hanging fruit was dishwashers, washing machines, and automatic coffee machines. And that fruit hung low because it still offloaded all the complex spatial topological perceptual dexterous stuff to the humans.
- lnsru 7y agoI can imagine, that folding would work if you put the clothing in well defined positions. Like putting clothes on flat surface, camera identifies exact piece and decides how to fold... But then you need well working mechanical parts and it will be expensive. A good washing machine goes for 700+€ and it’s a drum, electric motor, controls and an enclosure. Would you pay 7000€ for a folder?
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