Manufacturing company founder here - you are exactly right. I buy automation equipment. What I'm looking for is stuff that is relatively easy to program by my

Manufacturing company founder here - you are exactly right. I buy automation equipment. What I'm looking for is stuff that is relatively easy to program by my team (I do not have the money for tons of engineers to sit around programming arcane stuff), can attain a reasonably good speed, and has the reach and weight capacity I need. And I want economic cost with reasonably good reliability. Two-handed human-like arms don't interest me. Robots with human-like eyes don't interest me. Safety systems that are too sophisticated/cute/fancy aren't that interesting to me - usually cages or more recently torque sensitive movement is good enough to keep people safe around the robot. Often the trickiest part is the design of the end of arm tool, not the robot, and I feel this is where most innovation could happen that would benefit my operations. By the way, the above is why Rethink Robotics failed and Universal Robots (which got way less press coverage, and raised less money, and had a non-celebrity founder) was wildly successful. Universal built a co-bot with a single arm that was fast (enough) and could carry enough weight. It didn't look human at all. Rethink had an LCD panel with eyes on it and two arms and a sonar person presence detector and its animated eyes would look at nearby people to indicate it was aware of them. But it was slow and not as accurate. Universal Robots made the product manufacturers actually wanted.