[jam]

Our company [1] works with a large number of autonomous robotics companies of varying scales, tasks, and morphologies. Teleoperation is a regular part of the workflow for many.

It is an exceptionally good time to be building specialized hardware & autonomy systems for a task and then providing that system as a service to customers. This article went into a few examples, but by our count there are ~800-1000 companies currently operating with this model.

Happy to answer any questions about how people doing this deal with the myriad of issues (both business and technological). It’s a fairly new thing, but extremely well suited to the future.

[1] https://formant.io

[petra]

Thank you.

One of the possibilities of teleoperation, labor arbitrage to low-cost countries, and a response by regulators, to protect the local labor force and only allow them to run remotely operated jobs.

Does it still makes ecojomic sense to use teleoperation extensively in this case ? Are there any new efficiencies besides in-country wage differences ? Could this really become a big job category in the future ?

[jam]

It's important to keep in mind that teleoperation is always paired with an (initially quite immature) autonomy system. Just as blakesterz called out in the sibling comment, the strategy here is to start with high volume of teleoperation and then scale up autonomy over time, essentially increasing the productive output of one teleoperator.

We see companies all across the board, from 1:1 (or even multiple people always watching at once) to over 1:100 in operator / robot ratio.

In practical terms, this usually takes the form of operators being notified of situations that they have to resolve, and switching between systems frequently.

Once you're above a certain level of productivity, the cost of the teleoperator is negligible... so it doesn't really matter where you locate the labor as long as you have a reasonable path to reaching a high ratio using autonomy.

Fortunately, getting robots out in the world lets you gather the data needed to improve your autonomy system, and so it's worth it to get out there early as long as it's safe.