Why Is It So Hard to Build Profitable Robot Companies?

The news initiated a discussion on Facebook among robotics leaders, such as Chris Atkeson from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute; James Kuffner, chief executive officer of the Toyota Research Institute; and Giulio Sandini from the Italian Institute of Technology. Both companies and researchers publish videos of robots doing tasks, but sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of the technology or that those results were achieved in lab conditions. Tony Belpaeme, a social robot researcher from the University of Ghent, replied with a tweet, “I had [a European Union] project reviewer express disappointment in our slow research progress, as the Sophia bot clearly showed that the technical challenges we were still struggling with were solved.”

Source: spectrum.ieee.org