Re. infrastructure integration: it's always a cost-benefit analysis. I've worked at a robotics company where we integrated with doors and elevators. Doors was really easy, cost almost nothing, and didn't come with any regulations. Elevators, on the other hand, was a length process, required certified elevator technicians, and cost a lot of money. On the other hand, adding a manipulator to open manual doors is very difficult and costly (per robot), but adding a button-pusher for elevator buttons is not.
The post mentions several times how it's both costly for adopter to add infrastructure to support robots but also how other forces can make that infra already there e.g. how it costs money to install wifi in a warehouse but handheld scanners led to wifi being in them anyway (which was great for the robots too).<p>This reminded me of a quote about the future of automated driving (paraphrasing):<p>"We currently consider the following to be distinct and very different modes of transportation:<p>- car<p>- elevator<p>- train<p>At some point, those will all converge into a vehicle that can travel on roads (like a car), with other vehicles (like a train) and bring you up to a building floor (live an elevator)."<p>This seemed somewhat true to me until I considered two things:<p>1. The smart phone did something similar with a phone, television, computer etc<p>2. There is a scene in the movie Minority Report that does exactly what the author of the original quote described. [0]<p>The combination of another convergence device AND a fictional visual of what that convergent device would like really hammered home what the future might look like.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vrxyr1CjiSM</a>
> If we are asking a customer or end-user to do something they wouldn’t naturally do already we are making it harder for them to use our product…<p>The iRobot product line barely works without rearranging and adapting all of your furniture and floor space.
Some good advice here!<p>Too often I've heard: why make a robot open doors with it manipulator, just install a door opener on the door!
Fits the bill here exactly: making a better robot helps you scale. Only relatively recently that robots opening doors became a reasonable thing to ask fo, but not much robots yet that do this at scale I think.
This is solid advice, particularly #4 is the reason I have started building my own bots. I do have one question though, how to design the production pipeline such that it is easy to iterate on the bot design with minimal disruption?
Where does one get part-level information to qualify a supply chain as "juicy"?<p>Otherwise the first advice looks like a 1st-world solution that independent 3rd-world developers can't deploy. Could early-stage companies even expect this from their investor/connectors?