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Comment by NewUser76312 | Hacker News Reader

That's a cool little robot, and I see the appeal, definitely as an educational toy. I don't think the fidelity is there for real autonomous research. But the bigger issue imo is that there's no way this should cost $2000.

You've got a $250 computer, some lidar+camera sensor for maybe $1-200, 6 servos, and cheap plastic. Plus you want to charge a $50/mo software subscription fee for some software product, whatever I guess that's beside the point.

No shade on the idea because low-cost robotics is an unsolved need for the future. But this current iteration is just not competing well with other alternatives. Perhaps this is more of a comment on what we can accomplish in the West vs what's possible in Asia.

Why would I not go for this guy for $1600, and attach an arm? https://www.unitree.com/go2

It's not an apples-to-apples product comparison, but you get the point. There's just so much more raw value offered per dollar elsewhere.

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Actually the BOM cost required to make something stable that can execute manipulation tasks well enough is around $1k+ hence our price. You will find very cheap robots that can pretend to do what this one can, but in practice won't work well enough.

As for the unitree robot, this one is not unlocked for development, does not have onboard GPU, and does not have an arm. If you want it, check the price they give, it's very prohibitive.

You could attach a cheap arm to it but it would also not be stable enough for AI algorithms to run it. We're researchers ourselves, we would have made it cheaper if we could, but then you just can't do anything with it.

Our platform will deliver the experience of a real AI robot, anything cheaper than that is kind of a lie - or forces you to assemble and calibrate, which we do for you here. It is just the nature of trying to deliver a really complete product that works, and we want to stand for that.

EDIT: You can take a look at our autonomous demos there, you need something reliable for these: https://docs.innate.bot/welcome/mars-example-use-cases

That's just one example that came to mind. I guarantee I could dig for 30 mins and find a mobile manipulator platform from China that kills it on hardware-to-price ratio that is either 'open enough' or could be made so.

As someone who's dabbled in this before, I guess I'd rather just sit down and plan a BOM and do it myself if that's your markup anyways. Not that it's totally unreasonable for people who just want something super simple out of the box that works.

My general commentary is just that it's sad how much basic servos and what not cost in North America. We've completely ceded this industry to Asia.

Our servos come from Asia. If you can find a platform with everything we have for around $1k BOM happy to review it but we've been pretty deep in picking our components.

Also, fair to say that if indeed you're the kind of person who likes to assemble all of this yourself, you're not directly in our target :)

This is more for AI / software folks who don't want to have to assemble and calibrate everything and risk having an arm that is not repeatable and thus can't actually properly learn. We have seen many folks spend a weekend or more trying to put these together and end up with a barely working platform and then be disgusted of AI robotics

I don't want to be too negative, but all your demos seems extremely silly.

Sure, the package is really interesting and definitely got me interested. But not one of the demos seems like a good use of the hardware. If you want to position yourselves mainly as an educational tool I don't think that is a problem. But if you want to target the 'maker' community I think you should put some thought into that.

For example, you could change the 'security guard' demo into a 'housekeeper' demo. You make it roam your house during the day and keep an up-to-date list of things you need to buy. I think this should work reasonably well for laundry and cleaning products. And after you have some historical data you could even do some forecasts about when you need to buy things again.

Another example would be to have it integrated with weather data and when it starts to rain it goes around the house to check if all windows are properly closed. On this same note it could keep track of the window state during the day and send you a reminder to open/close some windows if the temperature/humidity is above/below some threshold.

I think that by having some more 'useful' examples you should be able to get more attention from the 'maker' community. My guess is that a lot of folks that are heavily into home automation would love to have a device like that help with random things around the house.

Best of luck with your product, and I hope you succeed because this idea looks really exciting.

This does not sound negative to me and actually is great to read because this is definitely in the list of potential use-cases so we could make a video for it!

As for humidity, we don't have a sensor for it yet BUT the platform was made to be extensible specifically for this so it's easy to add one (see https://docs.innate.bot/main/robots/mars/extending-mars)

Thank you!

Actually the reason is that with the Unitree products if you want the Python SDK the price jumps to $5,000 for the same hardware. At least it was the last time I checked earlier this year.

As a side note, the previous generation of research platforms for that size made in Asia were the Turtlebots, which go for that same price, but without GPU, arm...

I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate to

> I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate

Pretty lofty claims though, really think you're so above everyone on quality at this price point? I know what dynamixels are capable of, and I see the jitter in the demo videos.

Why aren't the manipulator specs easily accessible on the website? Have you run a real repeatability test? Payload even?

It's a neat high-fidelity garage build platform, but I don't see any reason to assume this price premium is due to hardware quality.

The jitter is some demos is arguably because of bad connectivity, we will retake those.

You can see however in these demos: https://docs.innate.bot/main/welcome/mars-example-use-cases

that it is indeed pretty smooth.

Also, sorry the arm specs were not there! You can now have them at: https://docs.innate.bot/robots/mars/arm

That's fine, but for future reference, robotic arms should have their specs listed and quantified - stuff like reach, payload, repeatability. If I'm a researcher, how do I know if this arm can do what I need? I can only infer so much from a few demo videos.

Final comment I'll say, it's a weird and tough price point. Actual research labs would rather spend $20,000 on a very high quality and likely larger high-fidelity platform. A random hacker or grad student will need some real convincing to shell out $2,000, sub $1K might better serve them. So what's the target customer profile exactly?

I encountered similar issues developing a $3K plug and play robot research arm in the past. The economics are awkward. You can actually just spend $5K and get a really good second-hand industrial robot (maybe even first-hand now from China). Or you could spend $500 and get a 6 DOF platform at least as good as your current platform's arm and then buy the sensor separately and bolt it to your workspace - bam, done. And no, the software isn't that important, servos are easy to work with...

Therefore my 'in between platform' was stuck in a hard place. I made some one-off sales, but never really scaled the business, which is what would be needed for any fancy "we're the platform where people do AI" vision to manifest to investors. Hardware is tough - they'll see your numbers and easily pass. They'll realize you need sales in quantity to get anywhere meaningful otherwise.

So I wanted to share criticisms and my experience so you can look ahead to likely challenges and hopefully get further. Best of luck.

Absolutely, the link I sent you has these specs you mentioned listed.

And yeah, I agree this mid-market is indeed tough, but this is the upper price I was looking for when I started with my AI background and bought a similar-price turtlebot then struggled to put a cheap arm on it. Anything under this is really bad for algorithms, although you can reduce it with just the arm and clamping it to your workspace as you suggested but then you don't have mobility.

I will keep your comment in mind, and thank you for the thoughtfulness. You might be interested to know that we intend to show something bigger not long from now. But this is, as you said, more for investors.

For now I'm content if there's enough people that want this one

> Payload: 250mg at maximum extension

Did you mean 250gr? Otherwise, what is this? A robot arm for ants?

Oh yeah, my bad, thanks for noticing

>Why would I not go for this guy for $1600, and attach an arm? https://www.unitree.com/go2

Quasi-Lego-style robo dog for RPi is $100-150 on AMZN

The kind of person who would buy this doesn’t care whether it’s $2000 or $5000 probably. They care more about whether it actually exists and will arrive. Complaining about price, especially for something so niche, is useless feedback if you’re not actually in the market for one.

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