Robert Playter
speaker
1,075 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2023
last heard Apr 2023
Robert Playter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
In a short amount of time.
And he suggested that we make the robots really inexpensive.
And part of our philosophy has always been build the best hardware you can.
make the machine operate well so that you're trying to solve, discover the hard problem that you don't know about.
Don't make it harder by building a crappy machine, basically.
Build the best machine you can.
There's plenty of hard problems to solve that are gonna have to do with underactuated systems and balance.
And so we wanted to build these high quality machines still.
And we thought that was important for us to continue learning about really what was the important parts of that make robots work.
And so there was a little bit of a philosophical difference there.
And so ultimately, that's why we're building robots for the industrial sector now, because the industry can afford a more expensive machine because their productivity depends on keeping their factory going.
And so if Spot costs $100,000 or more, that's not such a big expense to them.
Whereas at the consumer level, no one's going to buy a robot like that.
And I think we might eventually get to a consumer level product that will be that cheap.
But I think the path to getting there needs to go through these really nice machines so that we can then learn how to simplify it.
The transition from an R&D company to a commercial company, that's the thing you worry about, you know, because you've got these engineers who love hard problems, who want to figure out how to make robots work.
And you don't know if you have engineers that want to work on the quality and reliability and cost that is ultimately required.
And indeed, you know, we have brought on a lot of new people who are inspired by those problems.
But the big takeaway lesson for me is,
We have good people.
Showing 501–520 of 1,075 · page 26 of 54
← Previous
Next →