I own a Panasonic Robot welding cell, and I keep up with numbers of robots sold like that - I know your numbers are correct. My experience with programming the Panasonic is that there is quite a learning curve to get over, to do the most basic things with it. I think the small numbers of robot adoption could be a reflection on this difficulty, combined with high cost. My cell was $85,000. The robot was a great value at that price though, it generates about $2000 an hour worth of product. Paid for in 40 hours of welding, good for 10,000 more hours before its worn out.

The Baxter should prove me wrong, but I think it is just an underperforming platform. The current owners of robot tech would view it as under capable compared to arms from Kuka or Motoman or Panasonic etc. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIJME8-au8

I think the non-robot users, those companies getting a first robot, would find Baxter easy to use but would be less inclined to go buy one; getting a robot is a big step.

I have to think that ROS getting better and better, with offline programming, will help adoption. We are at the UNIX terminal phase of computing, or at best we are at a Windows 3.1 level. Nobody has made the iphone of robots yet, one that is very capable yet easy to program. Once we can get to a few swipes to get result, robot placement will increase rapidly. I love how repeatable the result is, and how fast it produces parts. It is about 3x more productive than my most productive welder, with equal or better accuracy (we still hand weld a lot of things)

Baxter was supposed to be the super easy to program robot, but he never seemed very precise in the videos, nor very fast (by design, but still - we buy these things to make money).

Kuka, the world's largest robot arm manufacturer, got acquired for $5B [1]. I'm not sure how that's a "small market." If Google believed in robotics (beyond autonomous cars), which seems to be the case given the acquisitions, then they need to start somewhere.

Universal Robotics was demonstrably worth $300M with (what sounds like) a more-or-less similar product. That seems like a good place to start -- and all big unicorn products start somewhere; very few jump straight from $0 to $Billions.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-midea-group-announces-bid...

One of the biggest robot companies in the world, and its only worth $5 billion? Yes, it is a small market if that statement is true. Which is a shame. Kuka robots are amazing, and capable of welding together cars to being rides at Legoland. And yet, one of the premier robotics companies in the world is worth less than 10% of Uber.

Robots are still hard to use, hopefully soon this will change. Then the market will get big. The robot arms are already precise enough, they need volume manufacturing to get cheaper.

Google's market cap $500+B so if they hit a home run their market cap will only go up 1-2%.

Until Google created AdWords, you could say the same about online search and sem ads too. All frontier markets start small and become big over time.

When we get the iPhone of robots, we're going to see a huge societal change.

I've been waiting for the IBM PC or Apple II of robots for far too long, and it's still not here. It's frustrating. Robots just are not very general purpose yet.

What went wrong with Baxter? I remember it being so revolutionary when it came out.

I have a Baxter Research Robot. The theory was that you would make up for the imprecise gear train (backlash at the gripper of 10-20 mm) with visual servoing. But this turns out to be hard. A big limitation is that the gripper-mounted cameras are 30 FPS (less if you try to use both) and add a full frame of delay, so the visual servo loop has to be really slow (like, 1/2 second to zero in on an object). That means it's far less productive at simple operations like loading parts into boxes than humans.

Also, its industrial design is really bad. I hate its hulking arms and smiling animated face. It's surprising that you can ruin an industrial product with ugly visual design, but there you are. For another example, see the Boeing X-32. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-32#/media/File:USAF_X...

Rant: Sheesh, now even Wikipedia is using full-page JS popups that fail to load and make the page unusable. Seriously webdevs of the world, do we actually test our own work on phones?

At least I was able to see the image first. I was wondering how much of the X-32's shape was constrained by functional requirements, and the same for the Baxter. Can a safer arm be made without looking as you describe?

The X-32 and X-35 were two candidate designs for the Joint Strike Fighter. The X-35 was chosen. They had the same functional requirements, but the X-35 looked less silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_X-35

You could easily avoid having a decorative face. The general arm configuration might look OK with some other ID.

What do you use yours for?

Machine learning research. But I'm currently using Fetch and simulations instead.

Baxter is supposed to be safe around humans, but to achieve this, they had to make it weak and slow. So it underperforms competing industrial robots. Compare: Baxter and Sawyer: [1] Festo: [2].

It's also not precise enough for precision assembly. Baxter videos show it stacking medium sized parts, not assembling cell phones.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPth0Q4apLU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH_t_1-tl40

In between you have stuff like Universal Robots' stuff which is human safe and relatively fast. For a startup knowing that the arm you're using isn't going to kill anyone[1] is huge in terms of being able to develop stuff quickly.

https://www.universal-robots.com/

[1] Or kill yourself with it, I've managed to hit myself in the head but didn't even get a bruise.