3 ms·

1) Most expensive individual third-party components would be all the servos together, then the computer, then the realsense, then the lidar. All the custom body

1) Most expensive individual third-party components would be all the servos together, then the computer, then the realsense, then the lidar. All the custom body panels and custom cut carbon fiber extrusions are expensive now, cheap when scaled. 2) 5,000 - 50,000? Right now it's about twice as expensive per kilo as a Lamborghini Aventador, and they only made ~4,000 of those. It needs to be 18x cheaper to hit your price target, and that wouldn't be impossible at scale. A big chunk of the price tag is generous margin (because they don't know how many they'll sell) and paying for the software, which amortizes well. Those costs go away at scale, but then you need to spin up tech support and a repair department. I do tech support for educational robots, and I can tell you it's not... simple, or profitable. Getting to that number would be hard. The design of the robot is wonderfully simple, (great! delightful!) but it's too easy to clone: the only complicated bit is the telescoping arm. Everything else is open source or commodity parts off the shelf. If they actually do sell a thousand of these, the Chinese will rush in and eat their margin. I hope either they have patents and some aggressive lawyers, or friends high up in the Biden administration, because if the design is successful, their company won't survive international competition.

janekm 6y ago
The telescoping arm is cute, and provides benefits for reaching into constrained spaces like a washing machine, but in the first clones it would likely be replaced with the standard "cylindrical" (e.g. industrial robot style) arm. Hard to imagine that they could have gotten a patent on "robot arm on Segway". The elevator part though?
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  A conventional arm? Oh no thank you. Heavier, need a motor out on the elbow joint with another expensive low-backlash gearbox, mast has to be heavier to support the off-axis torque loads, grasp trajectories have another DOF or two. Skip that, please. And it's not like conventional arms are even cheap! If you could buy a decent 1.5 kilo payload arm for less than $5k, you'd have a whole different argument. From the way the telescoping arm moves, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's driven by a flex-tape linear actuator. Pretty cheap, lets you put the heavy motor right next to the mast, no precision bearings, backlash not so much a problem. The whole package really is a great design, I'm a big fan. You can tell Edsinger has been using robots out in the real world, with regular people beating them up.

janekm 6y ago

The telescoping arm is cute, and provides benefits for reaching into constrained spaces like a washing machine, but in the first clones it would likely be replaced with the standard "cylindrical" (e.g. industrial robot style) arm. Hard to imagine that they could have gotten a patent on "robot arm on Segway". The elevator part though?

sbierwagen 6y ago
A conventional arm? Oh no thank you. Heavier, need a motor out on the elbow joint with another expensive low-backlash gearbox, mast has to be heavier to support the off-axis torque loads, grasp trajectories have another DOF or two. Skip that, please. And it's not like conventional arms are even cheap! If you could buy a decent 1.5 kilo payload arm for less than $5k, you'd have a whole different argument. From the way the telescoping arm moves, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts it's driven by a flex-tape linear actuator. Pretty cheap, lets you put the heavy motor right next to the mast, no precision bearings, backlash not so much a problem. The whole package really is a great design, I'm a big fan. You can tell Edsinger has been using robots out in the real world, with regular people beating them up.