The post mentions several times how it's both costly for adopter to add infrastructure to support robots but also how other forces can make that infra already there e.g. how it costs money to install wifi in a warehouse but handheld scanners led to wifi being in them anyway (which was great for the robots too).
This reminded me of a quote about the future of automated driving (paraphrasing):
"We currently consider the following to be distinct and very different modes of transportation:
- car
- elevator
- train
At some point, those will all converge into a vehicle that can travel on roads (like a car), with other vehicles (like a train) and bring you up to a building floor (live an elevator)."
This seemed somewhat true to me until I considered two things:
1. The smart phone did something similar with a phone, television, computer etc
2. There is a scene in the movie Minority Report that does exactly what the author of the original quote described. [0]
The combination of another convergence device AND a fictional visual of what that convergent device would like really hammered home what the future might look like.
This is solid advice, particularly #4 is the reason I have started building my own bots. I do have one question though, how to design the production pipeline such that it is easy to iterate on the bot design with minimal disruption?
Rapid iteration at the component level would obviously require custom components, and maybe vertical integration, which clearly conflicts with point #1 about riding existing supply chains. But you can still iterate parts of the design that you more or less "have" to customize, such as the body material, axis geometries, and dozens of other factors I can't think of off the top of my head. The collected data can both be used to improve training and as input into the design iterations.
Some good advice here!
Too often I've heard: why make a robot open doors with it manipulator, just install a door opener on the door! Fits the bill here exactly: making a better robot helps you scale. Only relatively recently that robots opening doors became a reasonable thing to ask fo, but not much robots yet that do this at scale I think.
The true answer is that it is hard, and requies very carefull analysis.
Putting a “door opener” on the robot is sometimes at no extra marginal cost. (Because it already has a manipulator to fullfill its job.) Sometimes it would make the robot cost prohibitive, and the correct solution is to use automatic doors. Depends on how many doors there are and how many robots, and what kind of robot and what kind of door.
Then again even if the correct solution in a particular situation is to add door opening manipulators on the robots very likely you would only want to support a few different kinds of handles. Imagine the complications of trying to support all door handles from baroque brass levers through modern spherical knobs to dogged doors the kind you find on a warship.