The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.
> This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.
That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.
I know. You don't get the GPU for AI in the base model, for example. Do you get the articulated hands?
A robot package with all those custom parts, motors, and motor controllers, along with cameras and a short range LIDAR. for only $22K is pretty good.[1] As this technology starts to work, it's apparently not going to be insanely expensive.
[1] https://robostore.com/products/unitree-g1-robotic-humanoid
It can lift 3 kg / arm. That's like barely enough for a super-sized coffee! What human role are you replacing with this? Some desk job? Why bother with the robot.
Thus my question - what scale are they targeting. At some level of sales their expected costs are right. However if demand is a lot more than they expect it could probably scale down to $10k, maybe less, while if it is less costs go up...
It's extremely common for dev tooling to be extremely expensive, even for widgets that sell for a few bucks at the retail level.
- Ford F-150 base price: $39,645.
- Ford F-150 Raptor R: $115,015.