51–60 of 387 posts
The idea of it being controlled by a remote person makes me feel like a new breed of gig-jobs could be around the corner. Buy a robot, and pay someone remotely to do your housekeeping for you. The housekeeper could even operate it from their smartphones.
I'm looking forward to the day a small home robot can do the dishes, in the sink – replacing a dishwasher machine. This looks like a small step in that direction.
Robots have a big problem - price tag. Research robot for $18k, Spot for $75k, single robot arm moving stuff from A to B - $50k+. How many organizations can afford that? No wonder, that robot adoption is extremely slow.
If something like this succeeds to the point of mass production, I could easily see the retail price been cut by 75% or more. That might be a big "if", though. I imagine a bit of the current price tag is "we want serious purchasers who will be partners in the development of this device"; they don't want to build them for people who will just dick around with it for a bit and then relegate it to the corner of the room…
I'm looking forward to the day a small home robot can do the dishes, in the sink – replacing a dishwasher machine. This looks like a small step in that direction.
Wondering what the benefit of a dishwashing robot is? Better off just wishing for a more convenient / compact dishwasher, I think.
I'm looking forward to the day a small home robot can do the dishes, in the sink – replacing a dishwasher machine. This looks like a small step in that direction.
Wondering what the benefit of a dishwashing robot is? Better off just wishing for a more convenient / compact dishwasher, I think.
$18k
At $1.8k it would be amazing, at $18k it's a big stretch. I would buy it at $1.8k.
That said, I doubt this bot will ever make it to the stage of being a consumer bot. The sorts of problems that need to be solved are on the scale of that of autonomous vehicles, probably even harder.
Google acquired many robotics companies in 2013. I believe most of the acquired companies' leaders had contracts requiring them to stay at Google for 4 years.
Did Google delay the progress of robotic technology by 4 years?
The VC model obviously helps enable human progress in many situations. But surely not all situations. How can we know when the VC model will be a net loss for humanity?
I'm glad to see those folks moving on and following their dreams.
Feels like it would overbalance given how lightweight and tall it is - any time it tried to pick anything up that was even slightly heavy it would just fall over.
Let's not pretend a consumer model is even remotely ready though, these scenarios are highly contrived. The goal at the current time is research, and at that price point there are a few options available.
This is quite literally a USD 18,000 "reacher" [1]. I remember a reacher being a pretty successful present last time I played "white elephant gift exchange" :-). 1: https://www.amazon.com/Reacher-Foldable-Lightweight-Reaching...
There's a few "grabbers"/"reachers" that have a gripper that looks pretty similar to the Stretch's; I'm not sure if there's an "original" that the others are clones of: https://amzn.com/B07RR6N9C7 https://amzn.com/B0812B4TF1 https://amzn.com/B01MAW25UW
this is very cool. could anyone help break down the costs? specifically: 1. what are the most expensive parts, and how fast is technology advancing (or costs declining) on those parts? 2. what scale is necessary for a comparable robot to retail for < $1000?
2) 5,000 - 50,000? Right now it's about twice as expensive per kilo as a Lamborghini Aventador, and they only made ~4,000 of those. It needs to be 18x cheaper to hit your price target, and that wouldn't be impossible at scale. A big chunk of the price tag is generous margin (because they don't know how many they'll sell) and paying for the software, which amortizes well. Those costs go away at scale, but then you need to spin up tech support and a repair department. I do tech support for educational robots, and I can tell you it's not... simple, or profitable.
Getting to that number would be hard. The design of the robot is wonderfully simple, (great! delightful!) but it's too easy to clone: the only complicated bit is the telescoping arm. Everything else is open source or commodity parts off the shelf. If they actually do sell a thousand of these, the Chinese will rush in and eat their margin. I hope either they have patents and some aggressive lawyers, or friends high up in the Biden administration, because if the design is successful, their company won't survive international competition.