
Robot Makers Fill Their War Chests in Fight Against Amazon - ehllo
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-20/robot-makers-fill-their-war-chests-in-fight-against-amazon
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protonfish
I am starting to get annoyed by the overloaded term "robot." This article is
really about automated warehouses. That is interesting, but is sufficiently
advanced automation truly robotics? If so, where does it cross that line? Many
hobbyist "robotics" (think BattleBots) are just remote-controlled vehicles.
Neither have autonomous behavior. It'd be nice to have terms for each but I
can't think of what would be appropriate.

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patja
I teach robotics to students age 11 - 14. We have settled on the definition
that a robot must do three things: sense, think, act. First thing I do is take
away all of the remote controls and tell them they have to program it.

I wish that programs like VEX and FLL would do away with the "tele-operated"
portions of their competitions. Kids may enjoy it, but too many of them fall
into the trap of treating it all like a remote controlled toy and never get
very deep into the programming aspect.

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eat_veggies
I don't remember FLL having a teleop mode. Back when I did it, it was fully
autonomous, but things may have changed since then.

However, FTC, supposedly the grown up version of FLL, had both teleop and
autonomous, and with the way it was scored, all you really needed was a solid
teleop to crush regional competitions, so we ended up doing way less
programming than in middle school FLL. I believe VEX worked the same way, but
I only did it one year, so my memory of it is fuzzy.

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greenleafjacob
Isn’t it FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition)?

It’s kind of simplistic to say all you need is a good teleop period. In many
competitions some teams that had worse teleop were picked because they could
consistently score in autonomous, which is pretty good EV.

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dogruck
Genuine question — is $70 million, spread across +4 different competing
companies, a lot of money, for an industry like robot makers?

Or, said another way, if the article had said the companies collectively
raised $700 million, I don’t think I would’ve been surprised.

Can someone provide context?

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rubidium
I'm guessing at numbers from my limited experience, but a new robot
development (let's say with some sophisticated features either hardware or
software--not both) is probably a 20-50 person development. Salary (in normal
land, not crazy west coast land) for a 2.5 year development is 6-15 million.
Material cost runs 10-40% more.

So expect something like 4-10 new robot platforms coming out as a result of
this. In a market where there's not a plethora of vendors, that's respectable.

If anyone has more direct experience I'd be happy to be corrected.

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petra
Is robotics currently limited mostly by money, i.e. with enough investment we
could accelerate the robotic future significantly ? or is it mostly the need
for new, better ideas?

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swarnie_
$70 million is not competition for Amazon, $700 million is almost a rounding
error in this context

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corpMaverick
This is what I think no one will be able to compete with amazon on warehouse
logistics. Kiva's model of bringing the shelf to the picker is hard to improve
upon. And it is probably patented.

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Element_
There are plenty of Kiva competitors from German and Asian manufacturers.

Some of the Chinese systems even use the same Kiva-style modules to do other
tasks like package mail sorting.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6a0HROB054](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6a0HROB054)

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

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amelius
Sounds like another race to the bottom.

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eru
That's the point. If you mean bottom of cost, that is.

Humans have better things to do than grueling warehouse jobs.

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username223
> Humans have better things to do than grueling warehouse jobs.

Sadly, they also need to eat, and the only way they can do so now is by doing
soul- and body-crushing work at Amazon "fulfillment centers."

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johnvanommen
LA Times published an article that indicates that these warehouse jobs are
replacing retail jobs, and they pay better.

Even better, the warehouses are revitalizing parts of the country that have
been blighted for decades.

For instance, I used to live in San Bernardino, and these warehouse jobs have
created opportunities in that city that simply didn't exist a decade ago.
Instead of spending two hours a day commuting to a retail job, people are
actually working in the cities that they live in.

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eru
Could you dig up the URL for that article, please?

