
Why Is It So Hard to Build Profitable Robot Companies? - headalgorithm
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/robotic-dreams-robotic-realities
======
dougmwne
The main competition for robots are people and people are cheap, plentiful,
and incredibly capable. It makes sense that robots would only be profitable in
highly niche areas that were too dangerous for people or so repetitive that
the bot is cheaper than the person.

It seems like we'd need something like off-world colonies, a fertility crisis
or environmental collapse to really create a need. I think I'm happy with the
status quo on this one.

~~~
ddeck
That's true, and yet we already have a $20-30 billion (depending on who you
ask) industrial robotics market.

There are a large number of highly profitible robotics companies in this area.

Fanuc with over $1 billion in net income from about $5 billion in revenue
stands out[0], but also ABB ($2 billion in net income from $34 billion in
revenue)[1], Omron, Kuka, etc.

They not be as interesting to report on as humanoid models, or the consumer
market, but it's an enormous, rapidly growing market.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FANUC](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FANUC)

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABB_Group](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABB_Group)

~~~
abakker
Yeah - those robotics company do exactly that stuff which is too dangerous or
too repetitive for humans. There's also the issue of strength. Robots are a
good candidate for handling materials when people literally can't. But, yeah,
those robots don't look like people.

Here's an interesting fact. Most people think of forklifts as being stronger
than people, and that we use them to lift stuff that people can't. That's
true. But, what most people don't think about is _why_ it can lift stuff like
that. Hydraulic multiplication provides the power to actually do the lifting,
but, a human shaped robot with the same hydraulics couldn't. Most forklifts
weight about 3x the weight of a car and are mostly filled with lead. The same
will go for robots. the form factor of improving human strength doesn't really
benefit from changing the strength to weight ratio, it benefits from scaling
both.

edit: as context, the average forklift is so heavy that when put on a trailer
they exceed the tow rating of 1500-class pickup.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
This is a mischaracterization of the size and operational use of the average
forklift. Small (like under 5k curb weight) forklifts outnumber the big guys
by an order of magnitude. If you count the small ones that the big box stores
use I'd say it's two orders of magnitude. Most fork lifts are used to move
small (<1000lb) things on pallets in indoor settings.

I personally think human form factor robots are a dead end but if the
Incredible Hulkbot was as readily available as a forklift then then you
wouldn't see so many things being palletized in the first place because you'd
just have Hulkbot move them. The reason we have so many fork lifts is because
we've settled on the pallet as a form factor and forklifts are good at moving
pallets.

~~~
abakker
Maybe so - I looked around on practical machinist and on some of the website
before making that statement and found that few items that really looked like
forklifts were available that had load capacities under 3-5K, so those
probably weight about 2x their load capacity. the kind of ride-behind pallet
movers aren't really forklifts, but obviously do come with lighter duty
availability. For reference, a pallet of bottled water weighs about 2000lbs.
and most big box stores would rather operate forklifts with some capacity
overhead.

------
SwellJoe
I recently took a job with a robotics startup...it's a tough business to
operate in with huge operating costs (compared to software), but I think there
are a lot of opportunities yet untapped. The old Feynman saying "There's
plenty of room at the bottom" is extremely true in robotics.

There are markets where robots have been (profitably) in service for a decade
or more, but they are big robots with extremely limited roles: An arm that
lifts a door onto a car, a glorified cart that follows a yellow line around a
warehouse or hospital or whatever, etc.

The new generation of robots is human scale and has more flexibility built in.
They deliver door-to-door/peer-to-peer, instead of along a fixed route. They
carry small packages instead of a stack of boxes. They do inspections in
places that aren't safe for humans. etc. Plenty of room for smaller, smarter,
cheaper, robots.

But, it is definitely a tough/expensive business to build in, and the market
probably doesn't have room for at least half of the companies currently
running on investor money.

~~~
petra
Why is building robots so much more expensive than software ?

Software is complex. The main tools to create software cheaper are abstraction
and reuse.

Can't those be available to new robotics startups ?

Is building a robot from standard components possible ? or using some sort of
software based mechanical/robotic design tool, similar to the procedural
modelling 3d graphic designers are starting to use ?

~~~
yingw787
I don't work in robotics, but from my electrical engineering degree, I could
hazard a guess:

\- Software becomes much harder if you have to interface with hardware. You
mess up software, you edit and then recompile/rerun. You mess up hardware, you
need to buy a new copy of the hardware. Imagine if every time you wrote a bug
or compiled a dependency with a bug, you need to pay $5 to somebody. If
somebody else's software caused an error on a piece of critical hardware, your
hardware may break too (e.g. car crash). And good hardware costs a ton of
money. A Dynamixel servo costs something like $500, for a motor that's maybe 8
inches cubed or less, but if you use a cheap motor from China your precision
over time will suck and software-based closed-feedback loops aren't as good as
good hardware. So maybe you decide to do simulations, and you write a hardware
emulator to load your software on. That costs a lot of money too, and doesn't
and never will mimic hardware in all cases.

\- Software for robotics is pretty low-level. You may need to write drivers
for special hardware you develop, or you may need to rewrite drivers if
proprietary drivers don't do the job for some reason. Drivers are if not hard
to write, then a long slog to write (I don't write drivers). You need to make
sure your software is highly performant, lightweight, and fault-tolerant.
Maybe you need a real-time operating system, or you need to fork the Linux
kernel and rip out bits and pieces (I heard somewhere SpaceX does this for
their avionics, because they didn't want to deal with an RTOS). There is no
let-it-crash philosophy. There may be no concurrency abstractions that are
performant enough besides threading/locking primitives. There's the added
complexity of failover that you plan into your design. You can't live without
any of these most likely, because otherwise your customers may not live at
all.

\- By the time you master all the tools you need to build a successful
robotics company, you haven't changed the system, the system has changed you.
You accept the truth that good hardware is hard to make, good low-level
software is hard to make, and great insurance plans are expensive. You're a
Windows guy now because you use SolidWorks to design parts, and you can't be
bothered to make a startup to rewrite SolidWorks for Linux because it's hard
to get the physics/math background to reproduce even a part of SolidWork's
functionality and user experience (which is a lot, CFD/FEA/etc). You deal with
manufacturers who are perfectly happy with older tech because it works and
because newer stuff always comes with risk. Your customers are enterprise
Karens who shatter your roadmaps and don't care about your dreams.

This is a (possibly inaccurate) tasting of why building a hardware company is
hard. I have the highest respect for those who do.

~~~
jchallis
What is an enterprise Karen?

~~~
yingw787
So this is a Karen:

"44\. mother of three. blonde. owns a volvo. annoying as hell. wears acrylics
24/7\. currently at your workplace speaking to your manager."

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=karen](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=karen)

I used "enterprise Karen" as a corporate personification of "Karen".

------
hhs
_" Overselling is a dangerous strategy that can be counterproductive, even for
the whole robotics community. Both companies and researchers publish videos of
robots doing tasks, but sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of
the technology or that those results were achieved in lab conditions. This
makes it much more difficult to explain to non-roboticist industry executives
the difference between creating a one-off demo and creating a real product
that works reliably."_

This makes me think of automobiles - cars were first seen as "a rich man's
toy", but Henry Ford worked hard to change that perception. He said cars are
for anyone. They can be used to go to work, to visit family, to go
sightseeing.

I still don't see basic needs like that being addressed with robotics. For
instance, is it going to take out the trash? Clean the toilets? Fix the
plumbing?

~~~
Ajedi32
Yeah, once we have a more general-purpose robot that can fold your clothes,
set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your dishwasher, washing
machine, and dryer (or at least handle a reasonable subset of those tasks) we
might finally start to see some progress in this area.

Those are enormously complicated tasks to solve in the general case though, so
I don't anticipate anything like that being available for quite some time.

~~~
ryandrake
> fold your clothes, set your table, cook breakfast, and load/unload your
> dishwasher, washing machine, and dryer

But are these pain points for a sufficient number of people? I can understand
robots that could do these tasks would be a godsend for disabled people and
the very elderly, but those are small markets. The vast majority of able
bodied people just fold their own clothes and do their own laundry. It’s easy
and takes minutes. I don’t think I’d even pay $100 for a robot that could fold
clothes.

~~~
ams6110
Laundry is absolutely the biggest "housekeeping" item I have trouble with. I
would pay a lot of money (thousands of dollars) for a robot that would take
dirty laundry and wash, dry, and fold.

~~~
goatlover
Can't you pay a human to do that, if you're willing to pay thousands to have
it done for you?

~~~
ams6110
Yes, I suppose I could. I guess that I don't want another human coming into my
house in my absence to do that, nor do I want to have to schedule it to happen
when I'm home. Nor do I want to take my laundry someplace else and have to
return later to pick it up.

I could probably live with leaving the laundry on the porch and having it
returned there. I'll have to look into whether such a service is available in
my area.

~~~
philwelch
Traditionally, you would physically separate your living quarters from the
areas where servants would work. In this scenario you could have a laundry
room in the basement and a dumbwaiter connecting your basement to your closet,
and have a separate door that only goes into the basement.

------
bitwize
Robots are still too stupid to be used outside of niche applications such as
military or heavy industry. In these applications, stupidity is a _feature_ ,
not a bug, as a robot is expected to only do the tasks its owner wants it to
do in the way its owner wants them to be done. But they still cannot be
expected to work alongside people in their day-to-day because either they're
not smart enough to interact safely with people, or people have expectations
set by C-3PO and R2D2 that the robots just can't live up to (something the
article touches on). Heck, people routinely get bored with Siri and Alexa
because these technologies pretend to be smarter than they are, and ultimately
outside of setting an alarm or playing a song, the value proposition they
present does not even meet that of the stupider technologies people are used
to. Real, exploitable stupidity is at the end of the day more valuable than
fake smarts.

So if you want to be a roboticist and make money at it, don't expect to be Dr.
Noonien Soong or Dr. Light. You will spend your career building dumb machines
to perform mind-numbing tasks for the world's militaries, factories, or fast-
food joints. Adding smarts to robots is a moonshot project, as Alphabet
learned with Waymo -- you need to be rich or have a rich patron just to get
anywhere. That's where things stand now -- maybe in a decade or two, things'll
be different.

That said, I worked in robotics on such "dumb machines" for four years, and it
was one of the coolest jobs I ever had. So if you can land a job in one of the
niche industries where robotics is really useful, don't let my desexifying the
industry dissuade you.

------
ThomPete
I am not sure I agree with the article's definition of robots.

The way I see it an automatic blinder that reacts on either a timer or
sunlight is in the spectrum of a robots. It's a very simple one, but it does
things for me that I would otherwise have to do.

Right now it seems like people are more trying to invest and push Robots in
the image of "The Jetsons" which I don't think consumers are even close to
being ready for yet, plus the technology and algorithms will always lead to
disappointment until we get much much further.

We need to think simpler. The irobot is successful because it doesn't try to
be a Jefferson robot despite it's name but rather it solves a specific need.

~~~
superqd
My kids get confused when I refer to my 3d printer as a robot. Heck, even the
2d paper printer is a robot. In that respect, I do have some very useful
robots. I would very much like a robot that could do household chores though,
like laundry.

------
Animats
It's frustrating. Even basic industrial robots have not been hugely successful
outside of a few areas, such as automobile assembly. Amazon seems to have
given up on the Amazon Picking Challenge; the last competition was in 2017.
Here's the winner.[1] That's just bin-picking. Manipulation in unstructured
environments is still very poor. DARPA's manipulation and humanoid robot
programs got as far as public competitions and were then discontinued. Here's
how far that got.[2]

On top of that, good robot arms are expensive. Startups announce low-cost
ones, but many don't hold up in continuous use. Universal Robot from Denmark
seems to be doing well, but their arms start around $35,000. Rethink Robotics
went bust. Even with more "AI", the smartness is mostly limited to targeting
objects that aren't perfectly aligned.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AljePt7Mh6U)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeABMoYJGEU)

~~~
petra
>> Robots ... low-cost ones, but many don't hold up in continuous use.
Universal Robot from Denmark seems to be doing well, but their arms start
around $35,000.

$35,000 is the price of new, reliable car. and cars are much more complex, and
suffer more forces trying to wear them out.

So why are robots so expensive ? is it mostly a matter of volume ? or is it
something expensive about the tech ?

~~~
sgillen
I think it is largely a matter of volume, Not just the volume of robots sold
but also of the sensors and actuators that go into them. It's also a matter of
market, no one is really selling robots in this price range to consumers, it's
all going to large manufacturing companies or to large research institutes.

There are of course even lower cost robot arms, ~$100 toys, $1000 educational
platforms etc. They just don't have the precision or power needed for
industrial or research applications.

------
hellllllllooo
> Overselling is a dangerous strategy that can be counterproductive. Both
> companies and researchers publish videos of robots doing tasks, but
> sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of the technology or that
> those results were achieved in lab conditions.

This. Autonomous vehicles are the most obvious example of the overselling of
robotics with the inevitable extending of the timelines that were promised a
few years ago. The more we learn the less likely it seems we'll get AVs
anytime soon, although anyone actually working in the area knew this already.

People were selling the idea of AV production systems that can solve hard
robotics problems that havn't been solved in research in the most benign
conditions. This was all driven by hype and money and it doesn't seem like
there was much of a downside to those overpromising. Unless this changes and
people are held accountable for their overselling then we'll keep seeing this
behavior.

It has a genuine negative impact on anyone trying to do something that is
actually possible and useful as their pitch will seem underwhelming compared
to all the noise being generated by the people overpromising.

------
vorpalhex
The short answer is that Robots are still heavily in the research phase, and
not useful enough outside of some industrial zones currently to generate any
profit.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue investing in them - they will most
certainly become more useful and generate more profit. It just means at the
moment, the best we can do commercially are more or less upgraded furbies and
security guards who drown themselves.

~~~
tenaciousDaniel
Precisely. I think we're heading into an era where we need to have a "hunker
down for the long haul" mentality, and yet we're heading into this at a time
when our culture is particularly impatient.

The industry is up against several Hard Problems, and it may be a long while
before any real gains are realized.

------
ngngngng
The near impossibility of building a robot to do something as simple as taking
out the trash leads me to believe that the impending automation apocalypse is
much further out than many people think.

There are limitless tasks that humans can perform with ease. There are very
few tasks we've discovered that machines do with ease. Those few discoveries
have changed the world.

In 2019, we can design and implement solutions for robots to do almost
anything. But with very few exceptions these designs fall apart when they
perform outside of a controlled environment or even inside of controlled
environments when tasks need to be done reliably.

~~~
cr0sh
> The near impossibility of building a robot to do something as simple as
> taking out the trash

Part of this issue is that we think we need the robot to do it like a human
would; in this example of "taking out the trash", we imagine the robot
grabbing the bag of garbage from wherever, going outside, and throwing the
garbage away, then returning.

Instead, what if the robot was the garbage bins themselves?

You have an inside robot garbage bin, and an outside one. The inside one would
- once full - wheel itself outside and interface with the larger one to dump,
then return. The outside one would periodically wheel itself to the curb to be
dumped by the (probably someday fully automated - it's already most of the way
there) garbage truck.

Essentially, make each robot a slightly smaller "garbage truck" that can be
dumped by the larger units.

Of course, that still means the robot needs to be able to navigate a home,
open and close doors, etc. If the home had automatic doors, that would make
things easier. Then it would become a navigation problem mostly.

It's kind of like something I told a guy at my work who said he wanted to
build a robot to bring him a beer. He was wondering about all the complexity,
etc.

I told him - why don't you make the robot be the refrigerator, then you'd just
summon the fridge to wherever you were, and it would dispense a beer, then
return back to the kitchen.

Dish cleaning? What if the cabinets were dishwashers instead? Plumbing would
be a nightmare - but in theory it would be possible.

Basically - think of ways to make the problems more tractable for the machine,
instead of trying to make the machine act like a human (note the automation in
many factories that does jobs humans use to do - they didn't make the
machines/robots look like humans to do them, right? In many cases, the tasks
and such were even changed for the sake of the machine handling/assembly -
such home tasks could be looked at in the same manner, to an extent).

~~~
sethhochberg
Thats the whole challenge we're dealing with now, right? Robots are trying to
participate in a world where all of the interfaces are designed for humans,
and thats why we get hung up on humanoid designs. I think its probably equal
parts whatever the futurism equivalent of nostalgia is and and the raw
practicality of making robots that understand human-world interfaces seeming
easier than rebuilding the entire human world with robots in mind.

------
syntaxing
Most hardware based consumer technology is derived from industrial technology.
Let this be electrical components (motor and such), computers, dishwashers, or
cars/automobile. Even though consumer purchasing power has been getting
stronger these past two decades thanks to the large boom in software
development, it's still not strong enough to push key technology. If the
industry does not adapt "general" robotic technology, there is very little
chance that consumers will see this in their households any time soon.

~~~
FrojoS
Counter example: LiPo phone batteries

~~~
syntaxing
But the cellphone industry started in with the industry. Either from the early
shoebox cellphone to the later model of Nokia and Sony Ericsson in the 90s.
The main purchasing driver was for business use. It eventually got to the
point of BlackBerry and iPhone which the consumer can buy.

------
tsukurimashou
When I saw Chobits as a kid I was excited about home robots, but I feel like
Instead we got smartphones.

I still think home robots could be amazing, they could interface with you
easily by voice and control everything connected to your network, act as GPS
when they follow you to your car, go buy groceries for you.

But I'm well aware that, if a robot like that is made, the implications on
privacy would be terrible (if privacy still exists by then)

~~~
lazyjones
> But I'm well aware that, if a robot like that is made, the implications on
> privacy would be terrible

I give it 5 years maximum before Amazon releases an "Alexa" robot that is
initially just the same Alexa we all know, just mobile (flying or rolling, or
both) with a small arm and able to do a few rudimentary tasks. There is no
real loss of privacy to be expected over current Alexa anymore.

~~~
stcredzero
_an "Alexa" robot that is initially just the same Alexa we all know, just
mobile (flying or rolling, or both) with a small arm and able to do a few
rudimentary tasks._

"Alexa, get me a beer!" Actually, a device or a couple of combined devices
which could enable that gracefully might sell pretty well. (Some kind of
fridge which can dispense canned beverages as the 2nd device? This could be
adapted from vending machines.)

~~~
lazyjones
Even if they just tamper with immobile, non-fragile objects like physical
light switches and door openers and if they follow you around as a mobile BT
speaker/alexa, such robots would be useful.

~~~
stcredzero
_Even if they just tamper with immobile, non-fragile objects..._

Like stubborn, sedentary spouses?

------
ChuckMcM
Note that they aren't talking about Kubota, Cincinatti Milacron, etc. People
that make robots for manufacturing are doing ok. But that also points to a big
hole in this story, robots and what they are.

Back when I was running the Homebrew Robotics Club the question of "what is a
robot" came up several times. Typically the definition is a machine that can
perform some task while responding to changes in its environment that might
otherwise prevent the task from being completed. The essence being sensing,
executing an action to achieve a result, and identifying/signalling completion
of the action. By this definition your dishwasher is a robot, it senses water
temperature, dish placement, and sometimes even the amount of soiling on the
dishes. It may adjust its cycle to insure the dishes are clean.

But most people mean mobile, anthropomorphic devices that interact with people
when they think "robot." And making a business in that space is very hard
indeed.

In part because we don't really have a way to "value" what the robot is doing.
When you replace a union auto worker with a robot, you can directly compare
the what you would have paid the worker in salary/benefits/training with what
it costs to operate the robot. The math is "easy". But when you have a robot
that is more "companionable" than not having a robot? How do you value that?
And if you have tasks like "fetch me a beer from the fridge" that the robot
can do, how do you evaluate the value of that versus doing it yourself?

Most people say "I'd love a robot that would pick up laundry off the floor and
put it into the basket next to the washing machine." But if you say, "Here you
go, for only $20,000 (ask about our payment plan), our picker-upper 1000 will
collect dirty laundry and put it in the basket." people always blanch and say,
"Heck for that much money I'll do it myself."

~~~
dsr_
Which is a little weird, because a $10/hour job for 40 hours/week for 50
weeks/year is $20K. The robot can presumably work 168 hours/week for 52
weeks/year, which means that it's roughly 1/4 the cost of a human (and that
doesn't count hiring time, HR training, sick days, worker's comp, taxes...)

The real issue is that we expect minimum wage workers to operate independently
on minimal instructions, and as every programmer knows, explaining what you
want done to a computer is much harder than telling a competent adult.

------
lkrubner
They are working with a terrible definition of "robot". Most robot companies
are profitable, if we are talking about all of the companies that participated
in the huge surge of automation that swept of the Western world during the
postwar boom of 1945 to 1973. Some of the biggest of the companies are still
profitable. This is also a line of work that has, somewhat, consolidated into
the hands of German firms. Siemens is probably the best known of the older
companies, and SAP is the best known of the modern software companies, but
there is a lot out there.

See: [https://ias.german-pavilion.com/en/home/](https://ias.german-
pavilion.com/en/home/)

------
Symmetry
The more structured the task the sooner robots will be doing it. They've
already eaten factory assembly where you do the same repetitive action every
time. Now they're making their way into cleaning the floor, mowing the grass,
cleaning up spills at stores, and (cough) putting items into boxes for online
deliveries. Soon they'll probably be stocking shelves too. But a robot that
can pick up your house the way a cleaning service can is probably the last
thing we'll see before AGI.

------
stcredzero
Perhaps highly contextually constrained applications are where we should look
first?

Machine Learning used for power tool kickback detection:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdW7vhYYSdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdW7vhYYSdM)

EDIT: This is a bit risque, but I'm seriously asking: Has anyone applied Deep
Learning to sex toys? The timing and processing of feedback involved seem like
a good target for current tech.

~~~
scotty79
Possibly NSFW [https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/autoblow-a-i-
replicates-h...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/autoblow-a-i-replicates-
human-oral-sex-techniques#/)

~~~
stcredzero
_Possibly NSFW_

Possibly.

o_O

------
roland35
I worked on a consumer robotics project which had great promise (in my biased
take at least) but ultimately was canceled and scrapped due to poor management
leadership in my opinion. It is expensive to bring a hardware group up and
running, and I believe that there were expectations to create a class-leading
product from nothing in under 5 years when it should have been at least 10
(see iRobot's Terra project timeline). It was a very exciting project and I am
slowly getting over it's untimely and premature demise :(

The constant changing of requirements was a challenge but that is normal for
any engineering project. I think the ultimate problem was the lack of
understanding of the "Iron Triangle[1]" in project management. The company
wanted it Fast Fast Fast Cheap and Good (in that order) but my team was trying
to make it Good Cheap Fast (in that order). So, I think if we did it all over
again we would have reprioritized from the beginning and dropped all the
complicated design decisions we made, and work on those in version 2 just like
any good MVP[2]!!

I think the key for a successful hardware project is strong technical
leadership who understands the pitfalls and timelines of designing the
mechanical, electrical, and software as well as can evaluate when and where to
build vs buy across the project lifetime. With robotics in particular it is
also important to understand how we can limit the environment to make things
easier for the robot to operate, with things like magnetic or painted stripes
on a floor, ultrawideband beacons, things like that. Making an autonomous
system robust is difficult enough in a controlled environment!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle)

[2] Some examples of things we could have completely dropped to save
development time: Bluetooth and phone app, designing low cost custom motor
drives, use standard materials instead of injection molded parts

~~~
fest
I really wish product development failures were described in as much detail as
successes. So much time is wasted by repeating mistakes someone, somewhere has
already made.

------
iandanforth
1\. Robots get classified as toys which sets an unreasonable price point.

2\. Robots arn't good enough yet despite any hype you've heard.

3\. In cases where a the product works better than the alternative and people
are willing to pay a sustainable price the company does well ... just like
every product ever.

------
erodr015
Brain Corp in San Diego is solving this problem as we speak. In about two
years, they've enabled floor care machines, a vacuum, and now an inventory tug
for grocery stores.

~~~
colebot2000
Just checked out their tech - pretty interesting stuff. Leveraging other
peoples machinery cuts out a huge amount of manpower needed to build a robot
from the ground up.

------
gauravjain13
Isn’t it very hard to build _any_ profitable company? Or are robot companies
appreciably/an order of magnitude harder to make profitable?

~~~
SwellJoe
Just from a logistics perspective hardware is harder than software to make
profitable, and robots as a business involves a lot of hardware. More things
have to go right, fewer things have to go wrong, etc. You rely on an entire
supply chain to get things mostly right mostly on time, and that supply chain
is mostly out of your control; you can have strong contracts, you can line up
multiple suppliers for each part, you can vet them carefully, but at the end
of the day you're tossing the dice that they'll deliver.

I've been working with a robotics startup for the past few months, and I'm
often struck by how much extra stuff has to come together to deliver the
product (in our case, we have to integrate with phone and elevator systems,
have to deal with various regulatory compliance in every country we ship to,
etc.). The sales pipeline is also long and expensive, involving shipping out
multi-thousand dollar devices for evaluations, sending people out to demo the
devices, etc. It's a _production_ involving a half dozen people and thousands
of dollars worth of resources to make every single sale.

So, yes, I think they are harder than some kinds of businesses. At _least_ an
order of magnitude harder than software. Though, because of it, the
competitive landscape is somewhat smaller...robots are cool, so a lot of
people want to work on them, so there's more than the market will support, but
it's less pronounced than, say, the mobile app market in terms of competition
for customers.

~~~
gauravjain13
This makes sense to me. I think the word "robot" has some historical/cultural
connotations that lead us down this rabbit hole of defining what a robot is.
Rosie from the Jetson’s? R2D2? FANUC industrial robots? It’s tempting then to
cherry pick one’s own definition of a robot, and point out challenges and
theorize why it’s hard to build profitable robot companies. The question is
fallacious.

In general, I think the hardware business is hard for all the reasons you
mention. Or better stated, the hardware business has characteristics that make
it difficult to get right the first time (more important in hardware than
software, I’d argue) and scale. It’s not inconceivable for a single (or a
small team) to build a useful software product that makes money (several
successful mobile apps, companies like 37signals, etc.). It’s difficult for me
to think of similar hardware analogs (I’d love examples!). This isn’t to say
that scaling software—building companies like Google–isn’t incredibly hard. It
is. But for a hardware company to even have a chance, it needs a minimum scale
threshold from the very get-go (besides all the other things that any business
needs – a useful product, luck, etc.).

I used to work for a large aerospace company in the early/mid 2000s, and the
products we built were useful, and amazing (hunks of metal weighing tens or
even hundreds of thousands of pounds flying in the air transporting people). I
was absolutely awestruck by the fact that upcoming companies like Google and
Facebook (which were “just websites” in my then-naive worldview) had fewer
people, and made way more money than us.

------
jcfrei
It's simply too early. The product cycle is probably going to be very similar
to smartphones. Two decades with lots of prototypes but negligible market
impact (Apple Newton, PalmPilot, HTC P Series). Followed by a decade of rapid
expansion when all the desired features can finally be implemented (like in
the iPhone). We are probably still in the Newton decade.

------
bluGill
There are a lot of profitable robot companies. They make washing machines for
clothing and dishes. I have one to open my garage door. Like industrial robots
they have people on either end feeding them.

I'm sure more robots will appear and some will be successful and called
something else. (I'm a lot adopter of the vacuum, but there are others in
developement)

~~~
gingerbread-man
“'I would say that a robot is a physically embodied artificially intelligent
agent that can take actions that have effects on the physical world,' says
roboticist Anca Dragan of UC Berkeley." [[https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-
a-robot/](https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-a-robot/)]

Industrial robots and Roombas may fit this definition, because they are
controlled by fairly sophisticated software that synthesizes inputs from
arrays of sensors to perform complex physical tasks. But less advanced
machines like dishwashers and garage-door openers don't really reach that
level.

Garage door openers do take input from an optical "obstruction" sensor, but
the response is binary: don't close the door. In contrast, robotic vacuums
translate distance sensor readings into a motion plan to cover every square
foot of your room while avoiding obstacles.

~~~
rhino369
That is a pretty narrow definition of robot. The term is often used to
describe programmable, but not artically intelligent, machines. Like robots
used in car manufacturing. I agree that washing machines shouldn’t qualify
though.

I think robot implies complicated actions that are reprogramable to perform a
wider array of functions.

------
rangersanger
Gall's Law : A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved
from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never
works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a
working simple system.

~~~
contingencies
Added to
[http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup](http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup)

------
outworlder
It is very difficult to have a company culture that optimized both for
software and hardware.

"Move fast and break things" doesn't work when you have to retool your
production line or throw away inventory, or call a supplier to request
changes.

Conversely, hardware development processes tend to be too rigid and slow when
applied to software.

It is very, very hard to get these working together even (and particularly)
when they are two distinct groups in a company.

I have had to deal with 'firmware' updates on a VM. You know, the full "build
and download a binary" thing from some website, upload to FTP, then login to a
website and point to that FTP server, so the binary would be applied and the
instance restarted.

No big deal, right? We do that sort of thing for OS upgrades, right? Except it
wasn't an OS upgrade or actual firmware, it was updating the application
running on that machine. The sort of thing that could be accomplished by an
automated CD job, and a docker pull (or heck, apt-get update). All because the
thing was an appliance. So it was lifted and shifted as-is and now "it's a
cloud app, because it's on AWS!".

I have had to argue against authentication for a HTTP health check. "But if
there is no authentication, people can spam the endpoint, and it's slow and
returns a lot of data". Ok, first thing: it's not a public accessible
endpoint. Second, I'm not interested in testing auth or taking the machine
down when credentials expired. And third, if it is slow, then just return a
HTTP 200 for me if it is ok, I don't care about anything else. "But if I just
return 200, it doesn't mean the app is actually working". Ok, so go do the
checks at whatever interval you want, and return the last run. "But this needs
authentication, otherwise there could be a DOS, as the checks are slow." No
you don't understand, they are supposed to be async... This went on and on for
months. I finally got the health check.

... but then, now they want to log all packets to our centralized logging, so
that they can count them. Dude, expose a metrics endpoint, Prometheus will
call it periodically. "But there are too many messages, we can't hold all of
these!" No, you give me a counter. Return the counter. "But counting messages
is even slower". No... you increment the counter _as you receive them, not
when I request_.

 _sigh_

So anyway. Even when hardware is amazing, software development can lag behind.
Or vice-versa.

------
yinyang_in
I see google as more of robotics company in making. They have software to
identify things, surrounding and object like we humans do(which I think is a
big feat).

They have a lot more pieces of complete robot problem.

------
slowmovintarget
Why wouldn't this work like personal computers? You use them at work or
encounter them in school. When they're prevalent in those places, people begin
bringing them home.

------
ChuckMcM
Apropos of nothing, Intuitive Surgical is a profitable robot company.

------
edoo
What we now think of as "robot" companies aren't really robot companies, they
are software companies. The hardware is easy and will be commoditized.

------
bigbadgoose
supply chain, rapid tech shift that affects _and_ effects capex, known
unknowns and unknown unknowns.

------
chhib
[https://youtu.be/1o_1d26JU5s](https://youtu.be/1o_1d26JU5s)

------
technobabble
[https://outline.com/C438br](https://outline.com/C438br)

------
lightedman
Hey, I could probably answer this one without needing to read the article, as
I have literal TONS of robots in my solar facility.

You know those nice multi-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars Japanese robotic arms?
We ditched them because it was just as simple to build our own robotic arms
with basic framing and motors.

At a literal tenth of the price ($70K for our Kawasaki armature, $7K for our
hand-built array of framing and motors with vacuum lines for picking up and
placing solar cells.)

Our in-house robot runs faster as well.

------
wojtekd
I guess a big problem is being realistic about the market needs. Maybe give up
on dreams about humanoid helpers and focus on industries that actually are
desperate for smart automation (e.g. logistics).

If you're interested in AI+robotics jobs check out
[https://nomagic.ai/](https://nomagic.ai/) \- we're hiring! Super exciting
work with xooglers, academics and oxbridge/ETH grads.

