Farshchi had been arguing that robots share components the way phones and laptops share processors and screens: common parts, very different machines. He used that to reject the general-purpose humanoid premise outright — a machine built to do everything loses to one built for the job. He then pointed out that specialised robots are the only ones that have actually proliferated, on industrial lines like Ford's.
I would say, yes, broadly. There are components that go into these robots that will be consistent across use cases. The cameras, the force sensors, the reduction gear sets, the encoders, the power management systems, the actual arms. The
building blocks. The building blocks.
…arm that is doing welding, it may have the same motors, encoders, force sensors, cameras as the robot that's doing the riveting, but the robot that's doing the riveting may have a larger, for example, range of motion. It has a different end effector attached to it. And so it is engineered for that use case, yet that use case is very broad, but not as broad as doing everything for everybody. So I generally take issue with the notion of we're building a robot that's going to perform all tasks because I think it'll be very difficult for a robot that performs all tasks to be better than a robot that's specialized to a certain task. And why would someone not use a robot that's specialized to that certain task?
And so on the specialization end of the spectrum, the specialization to generalization spectrum, I guess the bottleneck is if we indeed do have all of the raw ingredients that it takes to make a robot, we have the power, we have the actuators, the ball bearings. Really, the constraint is the…
And that's why you've only seen robotics proliferate in these larger industrial settings. Ford has tens of millions of dollars that it can deploy to companies who specialize in this, companies like Honeywell, Dematic, Symbotic, Winrite, these companies who specialize in engineering robotic…
It feels like kind of building a developer platform of sorts in that we just, we have all the basic ingredients and we need to be able to allow people to tinker with, play with, you know, combine all of the pieces in order to suit their needs. And making this more and more accessible is going to…