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Comment by jmcgough | Hacker News Reader

They've gone from Google -> Softbank -> Hyundai in a few years.

Does anyone know where their revenue is coming from currently? For all the flashy videos they put out, you so rarely see them that I'm not sure if they're just doing well on the B2B side (warehouse automation? military contracts?), or if they've been in the red for the last decade.

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I asked something like this last time as well. I don't think they have any meaningful revenue except for their dog bot "spot" which they only launched very recently. They basically just survive on funding, kind of like some university research group

Looks like they've just been bleeding money for years: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-17/boston-dy...

i'm not sure if they operate in the classical sense of a company with a budget. i see them more as a research facility with huge interest from the military and law enforcement complex.

> They've gone from Google -> Softbank -> Hyundai in a few years.

I was a contractor at Google when the Google//Boston Dynamics was happening, I now work//live in Silicon Valley, I grew up in MA, so I've been mildly following the story.

Is this sort of pinball "normal"?

Softbank said they were purposefully selling things off to do stock buybacks and cut debt earlier this year. They supposedly paid $100M for BD, so selling it for $880M would be a nice way to do that. I think the ping-pong is just coincidental timing of both Google and Softbank wanting to sell off R&D type things.

They bleed money and are not revenue positive yet. And all those re-acquisitions indicate that none of their parent company could provide a nurturing environment to enable the company to make profit.

My two cents. If not military use or a very expensive niche use, e.g. for emergency services, then those things will have a pretty hard time to enter the mass-consumer market.

What will probably happen is that a Chinese company will be able to produce a 80% version of those machines for less than 1k. This is when those things will become interesting to consumers for whatever purpose those things can be used.

As long as the SPOT robot costs over 70k, nobody will even consider buying it.

Unitree's Go1 is currently $2.7K. I commented on the HN thread below that if walking robots have any use/future - A company like Unitree could become the DJI of the industry and make Boston Dynamics even more of a niche player than it already is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569631

As someone who has worked with both Unitree and Boston Dynamics I can tell you there is a marked difference in the ability for Boston dynamic's ability to walk vs Unitree's. The ANYMal is closer to Boston Dynamic's capabilities but also at a similar price point. That being said what Unitree is lacking is good software so theres a chance that they may be able to incrementally catch up while maintaining a relatively low pricepoint. I don't think we're gonna see a DJI moment any time soon in this space purely because the other algorithms around this area are still in their infancy. Furthermore, motor prices don't seem to have fallen all that much making innovation in this space much harder than with drones.

Forgive me if I'm wrong but I though motors aren't the main cost, rather the rest of the actuator?

Also Unitree is going to make so much money selling these as well as get so much mass producing experience they'll probably be able to figure out the algorithms. Methinks the code is easier to figure out than reliable and cheap hardware.

The motor usually makes up about a third, the motor controller another third and the planetary gears and enclosure the final third.

You can see this in the Unitree videos, nearly everything is on a flat plane and while it was a video from 2019 it seemed to struggle climbing stairs a bit.

But they'll sell at a higher volume and be able to reinvest in R&D. Boston Dynamics needed constant injection of capital.

Where does 70k even go?

The high cost components of a robot like this are: Actuators, motor drivers, batteries, compute, sensors, and mechanical components.

I did not reference SPOTs specs but it must be full of low volume custom parts (expensive). They are honestly probably selling them at little to no profit as $70k is about how much a low volume custom research robot might cost in parts. But I could see them getting SPOT down to $20k in parts, but then you still need to do assembly which is going to be very hands on with technicians doing assembly and test engineers checking components. And one could imagine they'd like it if they could manage some profit. IDK it all adds up robots are super expensive.

1- Unitrees robot looks identical - though it looks like it lacks Lidar?

2- Is the Unitree robot so similar because of talent poaching or just a coincidence?

3-How could a person invest in a company like unitree?

Thanks

The more expensive versions of the Go1 have Lidar.

Robot dogs are going to look like dogs - a body with legs. According to the about page, the CEO has been developing quadruped robots since 2013 (his masters thesis). https://www.unitree.com/aboutus

Looks like they've take venture capital money: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/unitree-robotics

Softbank has served as the intermediary of a few major tech asset transfers the past decade - Sprint->TMobile, ARM->Nvidia,BD->Hyundai. Pretty impressive stuff given the geopolitical/regulatory implications. Who knew Softbank had such clout? The more you read about Softbank, the "curiouser" it gets.

This and the first few replies to it feel like they're coming from bean counters, not engineers. Who reads HN? I mean anyone can, but who's the core audience. I'm confused. Shouldn't the top voted thread be about the tech and the engineering behind it, and debating whether it's worth funding or not based on that, not based on things that are mostly the concern of business people. Is it that most engineers today have MBAs or are MBA wannabes? or well roundedness? But this focus on business metrics is not well roundedness, for an engineer, IMO.

I'm more just shocked that they're valued at 1B and are still doing their thing without a clear path to a sellable product. It's great and something I'd like to see more of, but we're long past the days when companies would spend a lot of money on long-term research projects.

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