
The Hunt for Robot Unicorns - extarial
https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/the-hunt-for-robot-unicorns
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wtvanhest
The most successful robot in the world is probably a washing machine or
dishwasher, not an iRobot.

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mmt
If you mean "will be" rather than "is", I'd agree. Otherwise, it's just a kind
of _reductio ad absurdum_ to stretch the definition of "robot" to include any
machine.

The key differentiating factors (any one will do) seem to be resemablance to
humans/animals (not all that relevant here, I'd expect), being self-propelled,
and being able to perform complex tasks.

It's debatable how to define "complex", but I'd say that, for example, telling
time, as a sibling comment suggests, does not qualify, no matter how complex
the mechanism required to do it well happens to be.

Similarly, a machine that washes items that have been carefully loaded (and
maybe even pre-treated by scraping food debris) by a human, such as a current
dishwasher, is also not performing a complex task. Doing so to a haphazardly-
filled bus tray or sink, however, would be.

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bsder
Robotics companies tend not to be unicorns because 1) they require monetary
input to scale and 2) you can't sell them to a FAANG.

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Isamu
Both Amazon and Google have bought robotics companies.

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gumby
FWIW google divested itself of most of its robot investments, though there are
still people at X (at least) working on autonomous systems.

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mattmg83
Knightscope is on its way to unicorndom, I believe, but overall I'd say robots
tend to be fairly specialized and therefore each go after smaller TAM than
most of unicorns out there today, many of which are agnostic to their
customers industry.

