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Comment by Liftyee | Hacker News Reader

As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...

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I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.

Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.

The robot vacuum is already there. The Chinese buit a better, cheaper one and the original company went bankrupt.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1lr75lp239o

Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on, but making a prototype is the easy part, making a sustaining business out of it is the hard part.

Moving the goalposts so soon.

You sure? You ever ran a business? Prototyping costs, machines, licenses, overhead etc. etc.

The prototyping and machine costs are easily under a million. It's one custom-built vacuum.

You can do it with 0-3 digits of license cost too.

There's no sane way the business overhead more than doubles things.

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