Robert Playter

As we find failures from these reliability tests, we need to go engineer changes.

And those changes need to now be propagated to the manufacturing line.

And that's a hard process, especially when you want to move as fast as we do.

And that's been challenging and it makes it, you know, the folks who are working supply chain, who are trying to get the cheapest parts for us, kind of requires that you buy a lot of them to make them cheap.

And then we go change the design from underneath them and they're like, what are you doing?

And so, you know, getting everybody on the same page here that, yep, we still need to move fast, but we also need to try to figure out how to reduce costs.

That's one of the challenges of this migration we're going through.

Yeah, things got more expensive and harder to get.

And yeah, so it's all been a challenge.

Oh yeah, much more.

And these are really just the first generation of these machines.

We're already thinking about what the next generation of Spot's gonna look like.

Spot was built as a platform.

So you could put almost any sensor on it.

We provided data communications, mechanical connections, power connections.

But for example, in the applications that we're excited about where you're monitoring these factories for their health,

there's probably a simpler machine that we could build that's really focused on that use case.

And that's the difference between the general purpose machine or the platform versus the purpose-built machine.

And so even though even in the factory, we'd still like the robot to do lots of different tasks, if we really knew on day one that we're gonna be operating in a factory with these three sensors in it, we would have it all integrated in a package that would be easier, less expensive, and more reliable.

So we're contemplating building a next generation of that machine.