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Comment by Rebuff5007 | Hacker News Reader

> Robotics-as-a-Service model

Oof. Amazed that venture-backed robotics companies are still interested in making this work.

Why not? Huge companies like Schlumberger work on a similar model. I mean these are not AI businesses (yet) but commercially the model is the same: develop gear in house and rent it out together with the specialists who operate it.

Most AI is not subscription but pay-per-use (I guess for an industrial robot that would mean pay per action the robot does), and that is a big part of why everybody piles into AI.

In practice, what this means is that a relatively immature startup takes on immense technological risk by having to invest in the capex and deploy a solution, all while being at the mercy of their customers to give them enough time and access to get the solution to any reasonable production standard. Usually robotics companies never get to that mark.

I believe theres on the order of 100s of millions in losses across a number of robotics companies that have attempted this in the last 10 years.

Why not? Extreme superiority of the Chinese supply chain network startup energy price market

AI as a service is hugely successful, at least on the stockmarket.

It makes more sense for complicated products, and things where any one user's demand is uneven. Industrial "plant" construction equipment is often leased for similar reasons.

Huh? I thought that was their entire selling point. That you can have a factory that needs retooling and instead of having to carefully plan and buy robots yourself, you can hire these guys instead.

Imagine a robot bricklayer. Some big construction companies may buy them outright, but for smaller projects, it makes sense to simply rent them.

Those have existed for quite a while now. For smaller projects it is cheaper to get a human.

Cheaper, for now.

If you can get him in time, plus are willing to risk unknown quality of his work. Reliable professionals tend to be booked long in advance, at least where I live.

Depending on the task, a human doing it may be highly discouraged by H&S regulations, or the insurer.

Even on individual small building sites in France I'm now seeing mini-diggers instead of human shoveling, everywhere, or tile elevators (for a 3 man roofing team!) instead of the stereotypical exploited immigrant manual labourer. These are justified by insurers quoting such a high price for covering the expected accident and long term health costs of human shoveling or tile carrying to roofs that buying the machines is cheaper.

Have you ever dug a hole with a shovel?

Mini diggers are cheap to rent for a few days on a job and you can shift absolutely tons more in a single day than a labourer can do in a whole week.

If a roofing company can complete three jobs in a month compared to one job without a goods lift then renting one for each job makes economic sense, especially if it's physically easier too.

I agree, should have mentioned that it must help productivity too. I was just surprised to see it on even the smallest building sites, like a 2 story house, where I thought the bother wouldn't be worth it.

aaS means you don't even rent them, you just pay someone to come and lay a certain number of bricks by any means necessary.

Airplane engine manufacturers retain ownership of their engines, and sell kilonewton-hours to airlines.

I don't know enough about airline finance to understand if this is a simplification or not. Are engine users really billed by the kilonewton-hour or by something simpler like a service hour? It seems like kN-h would be a hard thing to meter to everyone's satisfaction and some simpler proxy would do just as well.

"Under TotalCare, an airline pays Rolls-Royce a fixed rate per engine flying hour." [0] Not quite kN-h indeed. But the idea is similar (and more simple to implement, I suppose): you don't really own the engine, you pay for what you use.

[0] https://www.meritshot.com/rolls-royce-case-study

EDIT: wording

I wouldn't consider that to be not owning the engine. It seems to me that the airline does own the plane and the engines on it, and this is more of a usage-based support/maintenance/repair subscription service provided by the engine manufacturer. If you suddenly didn't want it for some reason, I don't think RR could or would force you to take off the engines and ship it back to them. They just wouldn't provide you with the support and service that you stopped paying for.

In the end the result is pretty similar as these engines are useless without regular maintenance and the engine manufacturer likely does not give the knowledge away to do it without them.

As far as I know they sell the engines at a loss or breakeven but make money on the service later.

I'm not sure a robotic bricklayer is going to open up construction to anyone who doesn't otherwise have expertise in the area. You still need design/engineering/permitting etc. The robot just replaces the grunt work.

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