Robert Playter

We didn't think that was the right next thing to do because to be a consumer-level product, cost is gonna be very important.

Probably needed to cost a few thousand dollars.

And we were building these machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million dollars to build.

Of course, we were only building two, but...

but we didn't see how to get all the way to this consumer level product.

In a short amount of time.

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.