Robert Playter

And so you can remotely sort of indicate this on the tablet and then the robot just does everything in between.

Yeah, it maintains its balance.

It walks itself into position so it's within reach and the arm is in a position where it can do the whole task.

So it manages the whole body.

We love working with customers who have challenging problems like this.

And this one in particular, because we felt like what they were doing, A, it was a safety feature.

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.