Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by s_dev 2194 days ago
A robot that works a 1% the rate is still cost effective if he's 0.9% of the price. Those helicopters are hired at hundreads of thousands of Euros per day and billed for minutes -- they can lift a lot of the materials in a single trip. Probably will have to wait for a more heavy duty Spot though for this use case.
1 comments

a human porter can carry 30lbs and hike through any mountain trails that this robot can - it'd be a lot cheaper to hire some people than to buy a $70k robot. people can also operate for longer than 90 minutes.

the helicopters are necessary because they need to carry large loads that can't be divided up, which a robot with a 30lb capacity can't help with.

> hike through any mountain trails this robot can

With improvements in programming, that's not necessarily true considering they have four legs.

> people can also operate for longer than 90 minutes.

Note that the 90 minutes is without payload. With payload it's likely much shorter.