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Comment by apeytavin

6 days ago

As a side note, the previous generation of research platforms for that size made in Asia were the Turtlebots, which go for that same price, but without GPU, arm...

I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate to

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apeytavin

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NewUser76312  6 days ago

> I would say the problem is that most manufacturers, including chinese, sell you platforms that are not reliable enough for AI manipulation, and there's a race to the bottom for it, to which we try not to participate

Pretty lofty claims though, really think you're so above everyone on quality at this price point? I know what dynamixels are capable of, and I see the jitter in the demo videos.

Why aren't the manipulator specs easily accessible on the website? Have you run a real repeatability test? Payload even?

It's a neat high-fidelity garage build platform, but I don't see any reason to assume this price premium is due to hardware quality.

  • apeytavin  6 days ago

    The jitter is some demos is arguably because of bad connectivity, we will retake those.

    You can see however in these demos: https://docs.innate.bot/main/welcome/mars-example-use-cases

    that it is indeed pretty smooth.

    Also, sorry the arm specs were not there! You can now have them at: https://docs.innate.bot/robots/mars/arm

    • NewUser76312  6 days ago

      That's fine, but for future reference, robotic arms should have their specs listed and quantified - stuff like reach, payload, repeatability. If I'm a researcher, how do I know if this arm can do what I need? I can only infer so much from a few demo videos.

      Final comment I'll say, it's a weird and tough price point. Actual research labs would rather spend $20,000 on a very high quality and likely larger high-fidelity platform. A random hacker or grad student will need some real convincing to shell out $2,000, sub $1K might better serve them. So what's the target customer profile exactly?

      I encountered similar issues developing a $3K plug and play robot research arm in the past. The economics are awkward. You can actually just spend $5K and get a really good second-hand industrial robot (maybe even first-hand now from China). Or you could spend $500 and get a 6 DOF platform at least as good as your current platform's arm and then buy the sensor separately and bolt it to your workspace - bam, done. And no, the software isn't that important, servos are easy to work with...

      Therefore my 'in between platform' was stuck in a hard place. I made some one-off sales, but never really scaled the business, which is what would be needed for any fancy "we're the platform where people do AI" vision to manifest to investors. Hardware is tough - they'll see your numbers and easily pass. They'll realize you need sales in quantity to get anywhere meaningful otherwise.

      So I wanted to share criticisms and my experience so you can look ahead to likely challenges and hopefully get further. Best of luck.

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