Comment by marze
9 years ago
Why not go big? Write up a business plan that involves buying 100 tons of lego, making a bigger machine with 200 bins off the belt, or whatever, and making a new brickowl / bricklink site of your own. I'm sure you could find investors, you've got great publicity already. And you could propose it as a general sorting AI (or web sale of small item) firm in the long term, with the lego being your initial application.
You'd need to solve the inverse problem of how to efficiently go from bin to packing container, which doesn't seem too hard. Rotating carousels of bins with little robots or something. Set the item on a tray, and if isn't the right item, puff it back into the bin.
If it won't work small it won't work big. First learn to walk. If I can overcome all the challenges and there is a sufficiently large market for the end product and when all the costs (energy, for instance) have been accounted for there is still a business case left then this might be worth it. But there is a ton of work to be done before you could begin to answer those questions. For now it is a fun project and I'm trying hard to keep it that way. I've been approached by some of the larger bulk resellers that would love to get rid of the humans they employ, none of them made a good enough case why I should partner with them or even seemed to be nice people.
The general nature of neural nets for sorting and classification I think is well recognized in industry and there are many companies that are capitalizing on this (and have been for some time). I highly doubt I'm doing anything original in that sense.
If someone wants to give you 100k euros and develop some interesting technology, it seems like it would make the project more fun.
What does anyone else think? Should Jacques open it up for investment?
I doubt anybody would give 100k euros. What is more likely to happen is that they would want equity in some company, a seat at the non existent board table, some wild eyed exit plan 3 years down the line and if they don't get their 20% ROI within the first year they'll be staging a minority shareholder revolt and possibly a lawsuit due to mis-management.
For 100K I will gladly sidestep all those problems and self-finance.
The problem is that 100k is nothing when building machines for professional/industrial use. Cost of material and various prototypes adds up quickly.
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