Google Canceled the Launch of a Robotic Arm
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Either Google didn't have it working well enough to sell widely (without embarrassment) or else they're pants-on-head crazy.
I fully believe that's why alphabet was created. Allow the `bets` to not use the google branding and name, and stealthy create new companies that produce millions of revenue, but just not billions.
Then why not just sell the tech and team to someone else, or market the device under a different brand name?
It looks like people were suggesting that Google takes this advice more to heart six years ago already: https://hbr.org/2010/08/what-google-could-learn-from-p
Until one day, reality reasserts itself and things start melting down. It occurred at IBM, its occurring at Microsoft, and it will occur at Google, Amazon, and the rest of the tech giants.
Years ago my father worked in robotics. The product was a very simple robot that took a piece out of a die-casting machine and placed it on a conveyor belt. There was nothing to program of any complexity, this arm had a fixed trapezium with different length sides that performed all the required motion, some sines/cosines/tangents involved to get the fixed path right. Most of the bits for the robot came from the R+S components catalogue, so usual industrial control gear, all 'tried and tested' with warranty, not 'home made'.
However, did it go well? The robot only had to do one job right but it rarely did. It probably only ever was one robot, customers were not exactly two-a-penny for this machine, even though it was in theory a very good machine. It would require on-site attention every week and some weekends. There was no fundamental design flaw, the heat had been considered, but it was a constant war of attrition on the reliability front. I would have to ask how that ended, all I know is that it was doomed, just not an economically viable adventure. Yet this was the simplest of robots for the simplest of tasks, solving a known problem that seemed to make sense to solve.
The main business survived the venture into robotics (sold to the same customers) but a loss had to be accounted for, people were laid of and the industrial unit vacated. A lot of hard work was put into it and the whole company was behind it. But it failed, reliability and support just could not be done economically.
So what are robot arms to be for outside of manufacturing, where Google wants to be with their customers?
If Google did get into the sales of these robot arms and 'learn along the way' there really is a risk that support for customers, 'beta customers', might be as all-consuming as it was for my father with his very simple robot. Then there are no resources to actually develop or iterate the product. You need to have the original creators debugging and fixing the robots in the field and there is a high likelihood that this work would take 10x the amount of available resources making actual development nigh on impossible. Much better to take the long route and get the product right before bringing it to market and avoid the trap.
Building robots is okay if that is your core business or if you have some massive factory that needs them. Here the cost benefit analysis can be done, things tested and deployed complete with a team of engineers to keep everything running. If selling adverts is your main business then maybe not.
(The brand protectionism is really starting to hurt their ability to be scrappy.)
What I really love is that they do true cash-back for unused data, not rollovers, etc.
When I went home to India it worked very well, likely because it just hopped on to a good network. Coupled with really cheap roaming data, and automatically using google voice for all calls, its simply awesome.
- Customer service is exactly what it should be, accessible, excellent, quick, friendly and timely. It feels a bit like stepping back in time 40 years.
- The service works very well considering it's combining the coverage of 4 different networks (3 mobile + wifi)
- call quality on the mobile providers is about what you'd expect from them, not as good as AT&T or Verizon
- call quality on wifi is great
- the additional built in services and integration into the phone are really well done: simple website to service the account, reasonable pricing, automatic voice transcription of messages
I'm pretty impressed with how consumer friendly it is.
My guess is that it hasn't been tested enough and/or hasn't cleared the top level of safety in the market. One incorrect swing of a robotic arm could severely injure someone and that is a huge liability for Google's name.
There is a small market for robotic arms. Total sales in 2014 were 229,000 units worldwide. Worse, from a Google perspective, robot arms require a substantial support infrastructure, with on-site installation, maintenance, and support. Google is terrible at support, let alone the kind of support where the customer wants a service tech on site right now because their production line is down. That's the norm in the industrial robot business.
Rod Brooks' "Baxter" robot was supposed to change this. Introduced in 2012 with a lower price than competitors, enough AI to make it easier to "teach", and better safety around humans, it was going to be the industrial robot that sold like a mass market product.
In 2015, only 400 "Baxter" units were sold.[1] The company's new "Sawyer" robot is said to be selling better, but hard sales numbers don't seem to be available. This just isn't a big industry. The first industrial robot, the Unimate, was sold in 1961, and there have been wildly optimistic projections for over half a century now. But the actual numbers aren't impressive.
Google acquired all those robotics companies and accomplished nothing with them. Even the ones that were shipping a product, such as Bot and Dolly, stopped shipping.
[1] https://robotenomics.com/2016/01/11/the-facts-about-co-bot-r...
The Baxter should prove me wrong, but I think it is just an underperforming platform. The current owners of robot tech would view it as under capable compared to arms from Kuka or Motoman or Panasonic etc. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8
I think the non-robot users, those companies getting a first robot, would find Baxter easy to use but would be less inclined to go buy one; getting a robot is a big step.
I have to think that ROS getting better and better, with offline programming, will help adoption. We are at the UNIX terminal phase of computing, or at best we are at a Windows 3.1 level. Nobody has made the iphone of robots yet, one that is very capable yet easy to program. Once we can get to a few swipes to get result, robot placement will increase rapidly. I love how repeatable the result is, and how fast it produces parts. It is about 3x more productive than my most productive welder, with equal or better accuracy (we still hand weld a lot of things)
Baxter was supposed to be the super easy to program robot, but he never seemed very precise in the videos, nor very fast (by design, but still - we buy these things to make money).
Universal Robotics was demonstrably worth $300M with (what sounds like) a more-or-less similar product. That seems like a good place to start -- and all big unicorn products start somewhere; very few jump straight from $0 to $Billions.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-midea-group-announces-bid...
Robots are still hard to use, hopefully soon this will change. Then the market will get big. The robot arms are already precise enough, they need volume manufacturing to get cheaper.
Also, its industrial design is really bad. I hate its hulking arms and smiling animated face. It's surprising that you can ruin an industrial product with ugly visual design, but there you are. For another example, see the Boeing X-32. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32#/media/File:USAF_X...
At least I was able to see the image first. I was wondering how much of the X-32's shape was constrained by functional requirements, and the same for the Baxter. Can a safer arm be made without looking as you describe?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-35
You could easily avoid having a decorative face. The general arm configuration might look OK with some other ID.
It's also not precise enough for precision assembly. Baxter videos show it stacking medium sized parts, not assembling cell phones.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPth0Q4apLU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40
https://www.universal-robots.com/
[1] Or kill yourself with it, I've managed to hit myself in the head but didn't even get a bruise.
With self driving cars, I believe Google is showing willingness to develop things that could severely injure someone.
disclosure: I work for Google. I have not been involved in toothbrush test discussions and do not work on robotics nor cars.
If anything, the Roomba proved that there is small niche-market demand for robotic automation in the home, and economies of scale for goods follows the demand. Consumers simply aren't going to spend the equivalent of buying a new car for something that can be done by a minimum-wage maid service.
a leased new car costs the consumer a few hundred dollars a month, which is the equivalent of say 30 or 40 hours of minimum wage labor. a robot that cleans floors, prepares food, washes clothes, folds laundry, cleans windows, serves meals, puts dishes away, feeds the dog, waters plants etc. could work 24/7 (with swappable batteries). i'm not convinced that consumers wouldn't pay that if the technology could get there.
of course we are far from a robot that can do all of that, but in my opinion, the prize to the company that can deliver this is massive.
It's an inferior service, the same reason the Roomba didn't put Dyson or Hoover out of business.
Also, how big would the market be if you could just say pick up that widget and put it over there on that belt. And, it said no problem boss.
And by the way it worked with any slim margin robot arm.
Toothbrush test generally refers to daily use. But I'm not sure I understand that context outside of mass-market consumers. A well-designed arm for light-manufacturing has 90%+ uptime and is (in fact) used daily.
Replaced by another cautious giant, forced to buy inventors from outside, instead of growing them within. Really sad. Everyone sets there ten-year-till-they-are-gone clock, on this re-mark.