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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015.

Robots are a branch of industrial manufacturing machinery. That is not, historically, a high-margin business. It also demands high reliability and long machine life.

Interestingly, there's a trend towards renting robots by the working hour. It's a service - the robot company comes in, sets up robot workers, services them as needed, and monitors them remotely. The robot company gets paid for each operating hour. Pricing is somewhat below what humans cost.[1]

[1] https://bernardmarr.com/robots-as-a-service-a-technology-tre...

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Having been involved in similar financial arrangements in software automation, years ago, it makes sense.

The end user usually doesn't have the expertise to even maintain the systems, nor does it make sense for them to do it in-house.

Charging per item of work (operating hour or thing processed) allows use of consultants but keeps incentives aligned between all parties (maximize uptime/productivity).

> Yes. I've known people with robotics startups, and have visited some of them. They're all gone now. But that was all prior to about 2015.

Lots of dotcom busts in the late 90s were concepts that worked 10-15 years later. We just did not have broadband and smartphones. Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past.

> Battery and AI tech is quite likely to be the missing piece robotics lacked in the past.

Cheap semiconductors as well.

Fabricating a chip on a 28nm and 48nm process is extremely commodified nowadays. These are the same processes used to fabricate an Nvidia Tesla or an i7 or Xeon barely a decade ago, so the raw compute power available at extremely commodified prices is insane.

Just about every regional power has the ability to fabricate an Intel i7 or Nvidia Tesla equivalent nowadays.

And most regional powers have 3-7 year plans to build domestic 14nm fabrication capacity as well now. A number of firms like Taiwan's PSMC have made a killing selling the end-to-end IP and workflow for fabrication.

That is interesting. I assume robots here means something close to humanoid for rent, and be programmed to take some or most of the human's job and not robots in terms of industrial manufacturing machinery?

Robot, as used here, is, in more modern forms, one or more arms with a vision system. Or some kind of mobile base for moving things around.

They're industrial robot arms, not humanoids, although the concept of android workers getting paid an hourly fee or "wage" (going to their masters, an android rental corporation) would be fascinating.

Even just a robot arm with an appropriate sensors and hand attachment could replace human employees in the world's oldest profession. Consider what drove the video industry if you're looking to invest.

Given that robot-as-a-service removes the biggest barriers for companies not buying robots, why aren't we seeing a huge growth in "employed" robots?

Because the setup is still too complicated.

This will probably take off once Amazon finally gets robots that can do unboxing, picking, and boxing. They've been trying for years to get that to work. Amazon already has robots doing most of the lifting and carrying, but people still handle each item.

People have been trying to do bin picking fulfillment with robots since the 1980s. Swisslog, Brightpick, and Universal Robotics have all demoed this, but so far it's not working well enough to take over. It's getting close, though.

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