True. Right now, here in the US, most of our Stop&Shop grocery stores use a robot that goes up and down each isle, checks for the products on the shelf, alerts someone if a spill has happened, and will even look out for shoplifters. I think he is known as Marty the robot

That's pretty wild to hear they're running daily at that place. Walmart recently rejected the 500 bosanova robots they had on trial - stating that humans are better. I have no doubt, specifically if those robots were running an unmaintainable C/C++ codebase in ROS or something. Every minor change/fix would require a very skilled programmer to recompile an entire codebase and deploy it. Too bad they didn't have Exosphere and humans could be assisting the control of the robots when they get stuck or have issues.

Have any of you considered making robot products that someone buys (like start a company)? One of the alternatives to the billing system was to close ARC down and make a robot product, but that doesn't align with my grand vision. I'd prefer to support any of you to make robot products. You know, we'll work with fantastic white label pricing on large volumes

PS, Nink - there's soooooooo many users that don't post on the forum who have already subscribed. I'm actually blown away at the positive response. There's a slight confusion regarding the incentive to monetization - meaning, our passion is to continue investing back into the software to make the World's best robot software better. It's not about benefiting ourselves with greed and buying new cars. I've been financing Synthiam (and ez-robot prior) for almost a decade out of my own pocket. Sure, we've had investors but I've been the primary investor and still am. It's not sustainable to continue giving software for free any longer. Any amount of revenue is incentive for us to continue truck'n on. It demonstrates that you all value our efforts. It demonstrates that you support our initiative and it adds value to your life. If no one purchased the software, I'd have to shut it down in a week or two. But, the positive response of subscribers lets me know this is something worth investing more into.

So the short summary is we're going to throw more resources at this and make the software even better so your robots get even better.

As for PoC hardware - we're investing effort into partnering with more hardware vendors to provide our customers with a larger selection of hardware. Such as Rock Pi X (which is my new favorite). We're continuing to design hardware reference designs as well - and anyone can manufacture them.

Have you ever felt you got to the party too early? That's kind of how I feel about robotics right now. I personally am running out of robot steam.

Eight years ago when I started designing Alan, I thought consumer robotics would be huge by now. When I did Kickstarter in 2015, robots like Jibo and Buddy were gaining interest, but by 2018 Jibo was a massive disaster and I could see the gap begin to form. In 2019 when I attended CES, I spoke to hundreds of business people and investors and the mood was "wait and see". But over all, the robot mood was gloomy.

B to B is the only growing sector (thanks in part to Covid) and I find that sector to be run by companies with deep pockets that develop specific task oriented robots in house. But, even that sector is running into problems when robots need to interact with humans or are just too slow to compete with human workers in the field. Elon Musk had a Tesla factory shut down to install hundreds of robots, only to shut it down and rip them out because there were so many bottlenecks in the production line.

After spending literally 100s of thousands of dollars of my own money on robotics over the last decade, I can say that I am disappointed in the flat line trajectory of robots. I believe there is some missing link to making robots accessible, inviting and affordable to consumers. The prices for raw parts to manufacture robots are slowly coming down but sticker prices on complete robots like Spot are still way out of reach for the average consumer.

Dj has said he would never do hardware again. There is a reason. Its expensive to keep the factories going, the investors fed and happy. And what happens after you saturate the market? Robots are just hard to do successfully in the current market. Education, toys and robot sweepers is all we really have to show for the past decade in consumer robots.

Take away? DJ is smart sticking to software. More so, that he has monetized it. Coming up with a prototype robot for a task, does not guarantee that an investor/s will think its a "good idea" and invest. So after months of work and lots of personal financial investment, you are deeper in debt without anyway to recoup your investment. Personally, I am slowly backing away from the dream that robots will be affordable and in every home anytime soon.

I will continue to build robots that interest me but not necessarily a prototype for a manufacturable product. I wish luck to all those that attempt to do so. I've done alot of hard work and research over the past five years and I can speak from experience, it is expensive and very difficult to do so successfully.

All good points Will and I have hit a similar wall. I never really had aspirations of building a commercial robot so my expectations were not as high. As discussed above, the only "killer app" for consumer robots are the vacuums. They are doing a task that nobody wants to do so they are appealing. My belief is that industrial robots are generally focused on tasks that people can't do and consumer robots are for things that people don't want to do. I am enamored in building an intelligent robot companion which would be cool but a human can also fill that role so there is no real need for it except for the cool factor.  I like to watch that show Shark Tank because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the show. The first question the Sharks as is "what problem are you solving" in order to make it a business. The future of consumer robotics is centered on what personal problems they can solve. A friend to talk to, I have humans for that so no need for anyone to pay money for a robotic friend that I develop.

Hmmm - there's no shortage of challenges in robotics to speak of. But i'd have to think all early industries started that way. Maybe we can group together with a positive mind shift and explore ideas of what robot products can be.

Oh - that gives me an idea. What if we all worked together one one robot? Or many... but like, if we all agreed on a specific problem to solve, then we could divide the robot into smaller components. And we can solve those problems individually and share our experiences on here?

So I came up with that much - anyone want to kick off a problem to solve? Don't think about the robot (yet). Just think of a problem that a lot of people have and then we can figure out how to solve it.

Marriage counselor when my wife sees how much I spend on robotics?

Better get that AIML2 script perfected LOL

Let's revolutionize chores to make our lives easier and give us more time in our busy lives

Laundry is a big one! The whole system of laundry needs to be dumped on its basket. My laundry folding robot and other laundry folding robots are novel but there's a real issue of time that needs to be solved there. From where to place dirty laundry, sorting lights/darks & delicates/non-delicates, to moving from a washing machine to a drying machine (could they be the same machine?), to folding or hanging, and back to storing in a closet or drawers.

Dishes would be my next request for problems to solve but laundry would be my first choice. Car maintenance would be another one.....you guys gotta stop me before I get too crazy lol.