80% of the time would be probably software development/integration. Some tasks/requests would look like this: * We have a working robot now, and this robot wil

80% of the time would be probably software development/integration. Some tasks/requests would look like this: * We have a working robot now, and this robot will need to perform very repeatable tasks by driving through waypoints. Let's design a state machine that would do that. * We need to make a system for outdoor mapping using a LiDAR. Can you suggest off the shelf LiDAR and localization system that we could use and then integrate everything in ROS? * My robot has misconfigured local navigation and it's not listening. Could you have a look? * The rangefinder we are using on the drone is not performing well. Can you look through the logs and help us troubleshoot it? Quite often the work requires me to integrate existing software. ROS (Robot Operating System)is amazing for this, as it has lots of open source packages, where some of them work really well out of the box. I rarely add anything to off-the shelf robots. Most of my clients are making their own robots and want help with architecting/programming these systems. I don't design any components (I don't have almost any experience with electronics). I can do some simple CAD design if needed but my clients are better of hiring someone for CAD anyway. I'm not sure what do you mean by robot designs from scratch - if you mean robots that you could build and program yourself then yes, there are plenty! I've listed some of the ones I liked the most in Awesome Weekly Robotics (https://github.com/msadowski/awesome-weekly-robotics https://github.com/msadowski/awesome-weekly-robotics). Currently I don't think I would try to compete with someone like Roomba. It would take huge amount of money to create robots like these at scale for the low price of these units. Also all the electronics need to be certified (at least with a CE mark, but I expect something else would also be needed). Rarely one person can pull something like this off from A to Z. If I'm ever to start a company I would like to try to grow it organically. If I ever get a really good idea I'll definitely give it a shot.