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by Workaccount2 1797 days ago
If you can't program it by directly showing it what to do, throw it in the bin. They probably intend for it to be SaaS too, effectively having you pay a workers wage for a truly terrible worker. You're competing with general intelligence robots that cost $12 - $15/hr. That's 10 years of full time labor for $300,000. No shot.

This looks like something designed to attract ignorant investors/talent who think small time manufacturing looks like a Ford plant but with less robots and more humans. In reality it looks something closer to Grandma's kitchen on Thanksgiving. How are you gonna stick a robot in there and have Uncle Fred program it?

I can't see this as anything other than a flashy high school engineering project. Much wow! little application.

Source: Work in domestic manufacturing. <$50 million company. Mostly do government/military electronics building.

2 comments

Assuming 8hr work days and a 250 day working year for humans. No such constraints for robots. That's 2,000 hrs/yr for a human vs 8,760 (assuming 24/7) hours for a robot. Obviously there will be other costs for robots (downtime, electricity, repair etc) so no telling whether it will be worth it in the long run but the hour calculation there does seem a little off.
When you are working on domestic manufacturing, what automation you have? How much of that is programmed by human (in house and from vendor?)

This is definitely far from mass adoption. But somewhere certain expensive product might benefit from this. Guess: mechanical watch assembly, given the amount of manual labor, and the claimed learning ability, it seems possible for a robot to assemble a 1milions worth of Swiss watch.