Robert Playter

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.

We have engineers who want to solve problems.

And the quality and cost and manufacturability is just another kind of problem.

And because they're so invested in what we're doing, they're interested in and will go work on those problems as well.

And so I think we're managing that transition very well.

In fact, I'm really pleased that... I mean, it's a huge undertaking, by the way, right?

So even having...

To get reliability to where it needs to be, we have to have fleets of robots that we're just operating 24 seven in our offices to go find those rare failures and eliminate them.

It's just a totally different kind of activity than the research activity where you get it to work, you know, the one robot you have to work in a repeatable way, you know, at the high stakes demo.

It's just very different.

But I think we're making remarkable progress, I guess.

I'm going to stop way short of the sentience.

It is the case that if you come to our office today and walk around the hallways, you're going to see a dozen robots just kind of walking around all the time.

And that's really a reliability test for us.

So we have these robots programmed to do autonomous missions, get up off their charging dock, walk around the building, collect data at a few different places, and go sit back down.