
VC Funding for Robotics in 2015 - beambot
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2016/01/12/venture-capital-vc-funding-robotics-2015
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Animats
Who's profitable? Once upon a time, 1983 was the year of the robotic startup.
That didn't end well.[1] It looked so promising back then; mapping using
ultrasonic sensor was starting to work. But it wasn't good enough.

So far, the only profitable autonomous products are industrial robots and
vacuum cleaners. (The surgical robots like DaVinci are teleoperators.) Even
Boston Dynamics, in the end, failed to produce a usable product; the LS3 (the
militarized version of BigDog) was canceled.

The technology is much better today than ever before, and there's a lot that
could be done. But so far, there's nothing that's cost effective enough to be
produced in volume. Except robot vacuum cleaners.

If robot vacuum cleaners were cost effective and able to keep out out of
trouble (such as getting snagged in cords) most offices would be using them.
That's not happening yet.

[1]
[https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers...](https://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/robot.papers/2000/Denning.Mobile.Robotics.bankruptcy)

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hayksaakian
Are drones considered robots? If so then they're a smashing success.

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ragebol
Some level autonomy is a requirement to call something a robot. Lots of drones
are remote controlled and thus not (fully) autonomous and not robots in my
eyes.

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terravion
Great to see this list on HN. It is a huge resource to the robotics community.

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compumike
Great list. What do you think is driving the growth?

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Houshalter
There have been massive improvements in AI in the last few years. Particularly
things like machine vision, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. AI
is one of the major things that has been holding back robotics. It may be that
it's time has finally come, or at least is very close.

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ef4
At least in the flying-robot space, I think cheap batteries and sensors have
been at least as important.

The sensors -- primarily accelerometers -- are etched in silicon, and benefit
from a lot of the same cost and quality improvements as other
microelectronics.

Batteries don't get better as fast as processors, but they do get better.
About 7% per year for the past two decades. That has been adding up, and
finally tipped us over the point where you can have your own tiny flying
helicopter for $15.

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isabelrotton
It may requires great protection on intelligent property since there are too
many copycats in the market. If they can "copy" with good quality, it would be
more acceptable (although it is not right). But if they are only produce
electronic rubbish as usual, they would destroy the industry and lower
consumers' confidence with their low cost rubbish.

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blackguardx
How has Sphero/Orbitix raised so much money? They have raised $88M total.

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xyzzy4
When will be the year when a robot will clean my room? I've been waiting 28
years. Please just make it happen, someone.

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lacker
Are you dirtier than a Roomba can handle?

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ragebol
The thing is that a Roomba (or Neato, I have one and they work great) only
vacuums the floor. I have a kitchen, toilet, furniture that needs cleaning and
dusting as well every once in a while. I still have to do my own laundry,
except for the actual washing itself.

I want a robot that does all my cleaning, not just the floor. Preferably
without buying 10 different robots but one that does it all.

