Comment by Rebuff5007
11 hours ago
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
11 hours ago
> Robotics-as-a-Service model
Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.
Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.
In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.
I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.
Why not? Extreme superiority of the Chinese supply chain network startup energy price market
Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.
AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.
It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.
Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.
Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.
I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.
Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.
Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.
Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.
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If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.
Cheaper, for now.
aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.
Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.
I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.
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