Hacker News Reader

Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

It would seem like such an obvious win-win if these cleaning robotics companies just won a couple of contracts with some tech forward hotel chains.

  - Faster R&D since hotel rooms are regular/familiar
  - Cost center for hotels so revenue would be higher/straightforward
  - No privacy issues since robots would not be present in rooms with guests
  - Easier servicing/maintenance since multiple robots at same location

View on HN

My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future.

>girl management

autocorrect glitch?

Haha, yes, meant to write "hotel management". I'll update the answer to fix that.

This is my take too. Hotels wouldn't be happy if a robot knocked a water jar on the carpet, or scratched a wall, but a home owner? We're doing it for free and you asked for it!

Hotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.

in that case they could operate the robots remotely just like self driving cars sometimes

Basically every AI startup promises the world instead of descoping to something that is achievable and profitable. Easier to scam investors than make a working product.

These guys may actually just be angling to sell off the training data. diverse training data is more valuable

Yeah, this seems like a much more likely option. Get a ton of good, completely unique scans of real world environments you could never replicate in testing and even if your product sucks and you fail entirely, you’ve got a really good dataset to sell to a big company that’s close on a product and needs data to enhance/refine on.

Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)

Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment. You could rent one hotel room or build a cheap replica and get all of your training done in one shot. They’re obviously trying to hit unique environments with many different unforeseen obstacles to overcome.

> Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment.

nonsense. If it worked for one hotel, that would be ground breaking. Hotels would line up to have theirs be the next test case.

He means it doesn’t make sense for the startup. The comment you’re replying to, is arguing that this point from the gp is a disadvantage instead of an advantage:

> hotel rooms are regular/familiar

I’m not sure it can ever be cheaper than a human cleaner so maybe the hotel industry does not want to subsidize the training.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com