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You are leaving out a lot of the total cost of ownership. $30K is the sticker price. You should be calculating the EAC(Equivalent Annual Cost) of the robot. Thi
by fred_durst 12y ago
You are leaving out a lot of the total cost of ownership. $30K is the sticker price. You should be calculating the EAC(Equivalent Annual Cost) of the robot. Things like, insurance, energy, maintenance, eventually upgrade/replacement. Remember the labor to fix a robot is much more expensive(probably around 10x with tools and other overhead) than the labor the robot is replacing. I wouldn't say it's definitely cheaper with human labor, but it's far from an obvious difference.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoDon't forget to add the cost for Obamacare on the human side.
- ObviousScience 12y agoI was including that in my calculations: I based the robot price at $30k, but that leaves room to include another $18k in yearly expenses ($1500 a month or $50 a day). This may of course be on the low side, but I also figured in only working 250 days of the year. It's likely that uptime of a commercial product would be somewhat better than this. My main point was that we're surprisingly close to the point where it's cheaper (in just a wage-versus-cost-of-ownership sense) to have robots replace more general purpose workers.