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Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

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Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#261

Post by ajmurmann »

mleonhard wrote: post #57

In 2014, I was at Google and went to an open house event at the Google robotics lab in SF. The people I met there were nice. I almost applied for a job there. Then I looked up the person who would have been my boss. He was scowling in his Google profile photo. His LinkedIn showed him as founder of a robotics company, with no mention of Google. He obviously wanted to be the CEO of a robotics company, not a director in…

Is the problem VCs or much deeper just the nature of acquisitions.

The ideal acquisitions would least to synergy between the acquirer and acquiree. This would lead to a combination of reduced cost, improved products and the companies and consumers all win.

Unfortunately, it seems to me like this might describe a minority of real acquisitions, at least in tech. It seems like many acquisitions get fumbled and the original company and their products are now bad and literally nobody won from this but the owner of the original company having a nice excited. In many cases tough the goal of the acquisition even seems to be to eliminate competition which is terrible for the consumer and hurts the market. In that scenario I'd rather see companies "fight to the death" or find their respective niches.

I'm uncertain what impact it had on the market and industry that some companies now get started with the goal bring a acquisition by FAANG. I have no data or even anecdata, but intuitively it seems like something that would be interesting for an economist to do a study on.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#263

Post by Descon »

spyckie2 wrote: post #26

Things it can't do: - go up stairs - get up after a fall / reset itself - pick up heavy objects - precise motion (so no cooking) - interact with buttons or touch screens (so laundry might be hard) The one use case I think it might be worth it is if the robot can take a room full of toys and return everything back to where it belongs. Kind of like a one click, reset this room. If it can help me keep organized and clea…

I picture these being used around hospitals and nursing homes for general fetching and returning of things. i.e. linens, telephones, keeping patient's belongings in their own room (this was a nightmare for my grandma in the alzheimer's ward) and other things that would allow nurses and porters to be more effective

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#264

Post by ideals »

mennis16 wrote: post #180
lopmotr wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody can learn how to do housework when and if they need it. Doing it as a child can instill a work ethic which is very useful, but there's no need to train them on how to do it.

You'd be surprised how many young adults are not aware of basic things like if your sink does not have a garbage disposal you should not dump large chunks of food down the drain, or that you should replace your dish sponge periodically. Certainly these are things that could be easily learned, but I do think there is a lack of awareness (or caring) about basic procedures on which cleaning products to use when, etc. I…

It's similar to how we don't teach kids basic accounting or personal finance in high school and they graduate and find themselves in mountains of high interest cc debit and making bad financial decisions after another, because they can learn it on their own when they're adults.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#265

Post by pantaloony »

monkeynotes wrote: post #244
koheripbal wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for robots to compete with below minimum wage illegal immigrant labor. I pay $100 for two people to spend 4 hours cleaning a 3000 square foot home - including laundry.

$12.50 an hour, how does someone make a living from that?

Lots of room/house mates, possibly to the point of illegality (that is, beyond the legal occupancy limit).

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#266

Post by fizixer »

espadrine wrote: post #201
fizixer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The robot is in your house the whole 168 hours a week, not just 4. You're assuming a good cleaning robot would be absolutely useless for anything else, like cooking, laundry, etc. - 4-year robot lifetime is overly pessimistic. If upgrade is not the reason (which has nothing to do with lifetime, it's your choice to upgrade), a robot could last way more than 4-years (especially with right-to-repair laws in place). -…

The first point has an obvious response and the last is speculative. I find interesting to address the middle one statistically. A given machine has a number of random events that can kill it. Each possible event type i can be modeled as a Poisson process Xᵢ with, in a given year, probability λᵢ. The machine survives in a given year if no occurrence of event i happens, with probability Pr(Xᵢ = 0) = exp(-λᵢ). For inst…

> ... machine ... has ... events that can kill it ...

> ... N independent event types ...

So if the robot blows a $0.03 (i.e., 3 cents) electrolytic cap [0], that's an independent event type that "killed" the machine? Just trying to get a sense of how you define "machine kill" (and as I said I mentioned a big caveat of right-to-repair laws).

[0] http://amzn.com/B01MSQOX0Q

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#267

Post by jimbob45 »

aptwebapps wrote: post #151
espadrine wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd gladly pay 5k for a robot that can auto-organize my stuff around the house The main equation for general-use household robots is: can it beat human fares? A good weekly cleaner (4 hours) is about €22/h in Paris, or €4.5k/year. Let’s say your robot lives 4 years, similar to your computer (which seems fair, since it is one, and an abused one at that). Since you amortize its price over 4 years, its initial cost mu…

Another possible angle is integrations, i.e. robot-friendly appliances. Maybe the washing machine has a powered door and an API that the robot (or some other software) uses to control it. No need to push buttons. Obviously, this won't cover all scenarios, but as someone upthread said, to be useful it doesn't have to do everything. The bigger issue, IMO, is avoiding distasters like Roombas trying to vacuum dog poop.

If I’ve learned anything in this industry, it’s that integrations cannot make your product viable. They’re nice, but are more often than not hail Mary’s because the actual product isn’t viable.

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#269

Post by ideals »

koheripbal wrote: post #204
semi_good wrote: post #68

> ex googler Does this mean we get lots of hype and an inferior product that is eventually phased out an replaced by an acquisition built by non-google engineers?

I'm going to just start putting that on all my PR. Ex-Googler. No one is going to check, and if it biases the opinions of idiots... so be it...

I'm an Ex-Googler, I used to use Google but now I use duckduckgo :)

Re: Ex-Googler's startup comes out of stealth with simple, clever robot design

#270

Post by dsr_ »

kylebenzle wrote: post #254
mrfusion wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need the three laws ASAP.

DARPA has done this long ago. I know you are making a dumb joke but the problem has been solved.

The three laws or an equivalent thereof? Cite sources, please. I think it's equivalent to strong AI.
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