That's a pretty impressive price point and I'd love to know more about the in house manufacturing.
The one company that has really succeeded in this area is Giraff. They've done so by intensely focusing on in-home care and the user experience for the person interacting with the robot. Things like end user controls to approve/reject someone who wants to start driving the robot.
Anybots, on the other hand, focused more on the driving experience. Their rendered, in-browser, drive window helps overcome the awful user experience of trying to turn under lag. They also did a lot of hard work to solve wifi roaming and seamless handoff.
I wish Double the best of luck with my advice being that you need months of uptime and recorded daily use in a target vertical before you're ready to release.
Thanks! We're out in Mountain View now, but we built out our own shop a year ago in Miami, FL. About 90% of the manufacturing on Double is still done there today by our contract workers. We have a Haas VF-2SS mill and have made custom fixtures for most of the parts on the robot. We purchased a Stratasys FDM printer and brought it with us out to CA with us to do rapid prototyping during YC. All of the prototype electronics were hand-soldered under a microscope and tested in house, but we will soon be handing that off to a PCB Assembly house now that the boards are finalized.
As far as driving goes, we have 3 or 4 different methods we want to experiment with once things settle down, but so far the joystick-style is most intuitive. OpenTok's new iOS to iOS video has cut down on the lag a bunch.
The one company that has really succeeded in this area is Giraff. They've done so by intensely focusing on in-home care and the user experience for the person interacting with the robot. Things like end user controls to approve/reject someone who wants to start driving the robot.
Anybots, on the other hand, focused more on the driving experience. Their rendered, in-browser, drive window helps overcome the awful user experience of trying to turn under lag. They also did a lot of hard work to solve wifi roaming and seamless handoff.
I wish Double the best of luck with my advice being that you need months of uptime and recorded daily use in a target vertical before you're ready to release.