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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

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teej·

Max payload is only 31lbs unfortunately

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They could carry little barrels of brandy to reanimate distressed travelers, like St. Bernards.

https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.220510.html

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/20908/why-are-st-bernard...

Maybe little flasks of dex, apropos of today's covid treatment news.

A robot that works a 1% the rate is still cost effective if he's 0.9% of the price. Those helicopters are hired at hundreads of thousands of Euros per day and billed for minutes -- they can lift a lot of the materials in a single trip. Probably will have to wait for a more heavy duty Spot though for this use case.

a human porter can carry 30lbs and hike through any mountain trails that this robot can - it'd be a lot cheaper to hire some people than to buy a $70k robot. people can also operate for longer than 90 minutes.

the helicopters are necessary because they need to carry large loads that can't be divided up, which a robot with a 30lb capacity can't help with.

> hike through any mountain trails this robot can

With improvements in programming, that's not necessarily true considering they have four legs.

> people can also operate for longer than 90 minutes.

Note that the 90 minutes is without payload. With payload it's likely much shorter.

In a fleet, or at least all the time, that's not so bad. Get 6 running, shifts of 2, you can haul quite a bit in a week with some electricity.

At that price point what is it better than? A human can carry significantly more for a fraction of the price. 31 lbs is essentially nothing.

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