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Every time I see news of a robotics company reportedly disrupting an industry, all I can see is the very large amount of prep work using conventional techniques
by Zopieux 3y ago
Every time I see news of a robotics company reportedly disrupting an industry, all I can see is the very large amount of prep work using conventional techniques (read: humans in excavators) to prepare the terrain for the (usually very strict) constraints of the robot being publicized.
If the new robot can install panels very quickly, but you need 3 weeks to flatten the field to unreasonable tolerances or install tons of dedicated framing and supports for it to function, your efficiency gains or cost saving numbers will take a hit.
Those considerations are unsexy and boring, they put a shade to the press release, yet are very important to assess the value of the innovation. I'll trust a company when they start being transparent about these aspects.
- iancmceachern 3y agoAnother example: These folks built a robotic restaurant. It took the form of a food truck in a shipping container, and they put it in our little food truck area here. I then saw for the next 3 months, engineers frantically running around a semi operational thing, until they took it away because it didn't work. The investors could have just invested in some food trucks, and made money.
- Zopieux 3y agoYeah. The most ridiculous example I think are the "3d printed" mud houses. Just look at the amount of support infrastructure. What a joke.
- lardo 3y agoThere already exists tight constraints on field grade. The mounting hardware has limits to how much one section can differ from the next. You can imagine that you need each horizontal beam some maximum number of degrees from parallel, and the vertical posts will only have so much extra length to account for variation.