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The list of Robot company failures and the robotic industry dead pool runs very deep. Just in the past few years: * Rethink Robotics https://www.zdnet.com/arti

• Igelau 5y ago
  It's not that the robotics is hard. It's hard to stop the time-traveling saboteurs from the Resistance from undermining you.
• pphysch 5y ago
  I think the key here is that Intrinsic is (apparently) focused on designing new interfaces for existing, proven industrial robot models, rather than being focused on novel hardware R&D (a monumental task).
• mikepurvis 5y ago
  Your conclusions are true, though I think it may be helpful to further subdivide into some categories as far as what the target market was and where they were at with technical readiness. Like, some of them (Anki, Jibo, Mayfield, Asimo, Reach) were 100% toys, and were always going to be at the extreme end price-wise trying to compete with increasingly "smart" toys being manufactured by regular toy companies with regular toy company processes, volumes, and margins. Others (Rethink, Willow, Schaft, Blue) were trying to do something really ambitious and potentially provide B2B value, but were never far enough along to have a compelling value proposition for the end users they were targeting. They were never fast enough or reliable enough to be competitive with the minimum wage labour that they would have displaced— if robots are hard, then mobile robots are harder, and mobile manipulators are the hardest of all. I think the saddest story in here is still Starsky, because they weren't in either of these groups: they really did have a clear value proposition, and they were technically there as far as delivering on it. The market needs what they were offering; they seemingly just ran out of runway at a time when investors were too starry-eyed about vaporous promises of L4 autonomy to want to back a company working on a viable hybrid solution. (Disclosure: I work for a B2B mobile robotics company)
  • soheil 5y ago
    Starsky value prop was teleop, but that was the same thing that cooled investors. Adding an extra 20-100ms latency to driving is akin to driving after two drinks. Operating a vehicle 10x larger than the ones on the road does not make this problem smaller. Operating large trucks is not a game VCs wanted to play.
    • mikepurvis 5y ago
      I don't think it was ever meant to be live driving at highway speeds: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stefanseltz-axmacher/2020/06/16/making-teleop-safe/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/stefanseltz-axmacher/2020/06/16... The point was that it was an autonomous system that could ask for help, and the "help" scenarios would mostly be cases where the truck was already stopped or at very low speeds: navigating a construction zone, a transfer yard, etc. Possibly in some of these situations it wasn't even wheel-to-wheel, but rather a system of choosing between a handful of high-level courses of action for the machine to then proceed with, or helping the perception system classify an unknown object it was looking at. I didn't sense from the postmortem articles by Stefan that safety concerns were what killed it. It was investors being disappointed that they weren't trying to build a truck without a steering wheel at all, since that was clearly where Uber, Waymo, Tesla, and others were headed (and at least at the time, external safety concerns were not seemingly impacting any of them).
• soheil 5y ago
  Market is not that big? What is the size of transportation industry alone? What about ride hailing? Investors are skittish? Cruise raised $10B most of it not that long ago, EmbarkTrucks is merging with a SPAC to go IPO soon, I could list others. Robotics is hard but that’s kind of the point.
  • stevenhuang 5y ago
    Saying the market isn't big is indeed questionable, as the total addressable market for advanced robotics is easily that of the global labour force. Likely what is meant is the market for current state of the art robotics, which have limitations and are cost prohibitive (capital wise).
    • riversflow 5y ago
      I agree with this analysis, although I’d disagree that it’s questionable, I’d say it’s straight fallacious. I’d draw a parallel to the development of CNC technology[1], in the case that if this software solution can become successful, it seems feasible to me that their might become some sort of equivalent to a machine shop, but for assembly/robotics instead of manufacturing/machining. Currently we have Foxconn, who is doing significant research in the manufacturing automation space, and seems to be making progress, but I see no reason this couldn’t take a similar arc. CNC/CAD was initially only for the most ambition prototypes, but as it proliferated it reshaped the product market, making curves easy and allowing for much more complex 3d shapes, and was kick started by the stagflation of the 70’s. I don’t look forward to (more) products put together by machines that are impossible for a human to do. But I genuinely feel that mastering robotics is one of the most important goals for society as a whole (and especially for safety conscious western countries), up their with clean energy and carbon sequestration. There is a lot of manual labor that (especially) Americans need to do, from updating infrastructure for rising seas and fixing the poorly maintained infrastructure we have, to increasing housing in urban centers, to whatever form carbon sequestration ends up taking––and western disease leaves these countries mostly unfit for the task ahead. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_contr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_numerical_contr ol
  • 5y ago
• 3pt14159 5y ago
  The issue with most pure-robotics-that-make-things[0] companies is that they end up finding out that they need to iterate on the robot while the actual product gets better. It's not like software where essentially everyone can use the same spreadsheet. It's "oh, I need this panel here to have a 3mm smaller gap" which works when you're Tesla, because the product is the company, but it doesn't really work when you're just trying to make a series of robots that solve generalizable problems. Reality isn't as standardized as a Turing tape. Too many dimensions, figurative or literal. [0] As opposed to robots that, say, fight wars. But we call those things "missiles" and "fighter jets" and "drones" not robots.
  • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    Missile robots are the best: you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers, and they are not expected to be functioning after just one use.
    • Tuna-Fish 5y ago
      Sadly, not that easy. > you don't really need to worry much about supporting legacy products years after selling them to customers You really, really do. Missiles are expensive, and stay in inventories for a very long time, and they need to be made compatible with every update to every platform that can make use of them. That wouldn't be so bad, but then you also need to prove that they work with all those platforms. This is hard. > they are not expected to be functioning after just one use. Missiles are only fired once, but that doesn't mean they are used once. The typical "use" of an aircraft carried missile is that it is attached to a plane, powered up, and then the plane does a sortie and lands, and then the missile is removed and maintained. There is a lot of maintenance that is done to the missile daily.
      • Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
        You are running the joke by being that Obvious, Cap.
• genericone 5y ago
  The fittest robot for any application is indistinguishable from an appliance or a machine tool made for that application. If your robot can't receive either of those labels, your robot company is doomed to a slow death.
  • Qworg 5y ago
    I cannot agree enough - we always used to say the best robots aren't called robots, they're called washing machines and dishwashers.
• Twirrim 5y ago
  Amazon bought Kiva a while back now to do robotics for them, and it's used heavily in their warehouses and facilities around retail side. Anything they can automate through robotics, they try to as robots can work 24x7 (other than maintenance requirements) and over their life span cost less than human workers. They also sponsor engineering competitions around trying to make generalised picking machines. It's good PR for them, and although unlikely any time soon, someone _might_ have an inspired idea and solve something that has vexed experts for a long time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUx-ljgB-5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUx-ljgB-5Q shows some footage of the robotics they use.
  • cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    Tom Scott had a good video a couple of weeks ago about a grocery packing warehouse that has a sophisticated picking network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
    • arkitaip 5y ago
      That Ocado factory had a fire recently cause by a robot collision, so the quality doesn't seem quite there yet [0] [0] https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/19/ocado-warehouse-fire-caused-by-robot-collision-delays-online-food-orders https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/07/19/ocado-warehouse-fir...
• rexreed 5y ago
  And just today: https://www.aitrends.com/robotics/softbanks-humanoid-robot-pepper-cant-hold-a-job-gets-shelved/ https://www.aitrends.com/robotics/softbanks-humanoid-robot-p...
• justicezyx 5y ago
  Looks rather small number of investment There were hundreds of copycats startups in China following the trendy business ideas at the moments. The Groupon era Streaming Short video Gif sharing Etc... It just looks like not enough money in robotics, not that robotics are wasting them