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.
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Appearances
B, we saw that the robot could do it.
because they tele-operated it the first time, probably took them an hour to do it the first time, right?
But the robot was clearly capable.
And we thought, oh, this is a great problem for us to work on, to figure out how to automate a manipulation task.
And so we took it on, not because we were gonna make a bunch of money from it in selling the robot back to them, but because it motivated us to go solve what we saw as the next logical step.
But many of our customers, in fact,
we try to, our bigger customers, typically ones who are going to run a utility or a factory or something like that, we take that kind of direction from them.
And if they're, especially if they're going to buy 10 or 20 or 30 robots, and they say, I really needed to do this.
Well, that's exactly the right kind of problem that we want to be working on.
And so.
Well, in the early days, of course, you know, the money we made was from doing contract R&D work.
And we made money, but, you know, we weren't growing and we weren't selling a product.
And then we went through several owners who had a vision of not only developing advanced technology, but eventually developing products.
And so both Google and SoftBank and now Hyundai had that vision and were willing to provide that investment.
Now, our discipline is that we need to go find applications that are broad enough that you could imagine selling thousands of robots, because it doesn't work if you don't sell thousands or tens of thousands of robots.
If you only sell hundreds, you will commercially fail.
And that's where most of the small robot companies have died.
And that's a challenge because A, you need to field the robots, they need to start to become reliable, and as we've said, that takes time and investment to get there.
And so it really does take visionary investment to get there.
But we believe that we are going to make money in this industrial monitoring space because if a chip fab, if the line goes down because a vacuum pump failed someplace, that can be a very expensive process.
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