The Robot Report Podcast
00:13:56 · Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman
[00:13:56] S0: Yeah. I guess, you know, privacy is not... You know, there's obviously cameras and stuff within these Robotaxis. Right? So the the... Your privacy is is not completely there. But... [00:14:06] S1: But I think like everything else, there'll be a marketplace, so there'll be a different cost if you want to share the ride. So again, if you want the privacy, you can pay for the privacy. If you want a cheaper ride, you want to share, maybe, I don't know, you like to talk to people. [00:14:19] S0: Yeah. It's interesting. I know I've shared this story on the podcast before. You know, this was years ago, man. I'm trying to think of what year it was. Geez. It's probably ten years ago. Eugene and I actually took a Robotexi ride around San Francisco, but we went on one of the highways. And then we also drove around the Strip. [00:14:39] S1: San Francisco, you mean Vegas? You said...
00:14:39 · Mike Oitzman, Steve Crowe
[00:14:39] S1: San Francisco, you mean Vegas? You said... [00:14:42] S0: Yeah. Las Vegas. Yeah. Did I say San Francisco? Yeah. I meant... I meant Las Vegas. Yeah. Sorry. And we had a... For most of the ride, it was great. And then when we were getting off the highway, it was a four lane highway, and we went all the way over to the right and we merged, you know, there was a vehicle way ahead of us and there was a vehicle way behind us and we merged in between the two. Again, plenty of space between the two cars and the car in front of us was actually getting off at the same exit that we were getting off. And it slowed down to get off the exit as any driver is supposed to do. And our autonomous vehicle did not see that car whatsoever. And, you know, again, this was ten, at least ten years ago, somewhere in that range. So there were human, engineers. There was, I think, three... Two or three engineers, two people in the front seat. Eugene and I were in the back. There may have been somebody else in the back with us, but the person in the driver's seat had to slam on the brakes because their car did not see the car in front of us, and we would have gotten in a pretty bad car accident. So thank God for that guy's quick reaction time. But it would be interesting. I'm gonna have to take a trip to Vegas now. Yeah. I used to go Vegas all the time for CES, and you've kind of been doing that for the last few years. So I think I'm... We're gonna have to battle over who goes to CES twenty twenty six.
00:14:42 · Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman
[00:14:42] S0: Yeah. Las Vegas. Yeah. Did I say San Francisco? Yeah. I meant... I meant Las Vegas. Yeah. Sorry. And we had a... For most of the ride, it was great. And then when we were getting off the highway, it was a four lane highway, and we went all the way over to the right and we merged, you know, there was a vehicle way ahead of us and there was a vehicle way behind us and we merged in between the two. Again, plenty of space between the two cars and the car in front of us was actually getting off at the same exit that we were getting off. And it slowed down to get off the exit as any driver is supposed to do. And our autonomous vehicle did not see that car whatsoever. And, you know, again, this was ten, at least ten years ago, somewhere in that range. So there were human, engineers. There was, I think, three... Two or three engineers, two people in the front seat. Eugene and I were in the back. There may have been somebody else in the back with us, but the person in the driver's seat had to slam on the brakes because their car did not see the car in front of us, and we would have gotten in a pretty bad car accident. So thank God for that guy's quick reaction time. But it would be interesting. I'm gonna have to take a trip to Vegas now. Yeah. I used to go Vegas all the time for CES, and you've kind of been doing that for the last few years. So I think I'm... We're gonna have to battle over who goes to CES twenty twenty six. [00:15:59] S1: I'm ready to give it up. My my feet are... You can take CES this year. Alright. I'm in. Yeah. You So,
00:15:59 · Mike Oitzman, Steve Crowe, Eugene Demetri
[00:15:59] S1: I'm ready to give it up. My my feet are... You can take CES this year. Alright. I'm in. Yeah. You So, [00:16:06] S0: yeah, Zoox live now in Las Vegas on the strip. [00:16:10] S3: Let's
00:16:10 · Steve Crowe
[00:16:10] S0: go. And they're also testing out in California as well in San Francisco and Foster City. I think Foster City is where the company is based. So they're testing there as well. I think the vehicles are only open to Zoox employees in those areas. So hey, they've launched in Vegas, maybe they'll be launching in San Francisco and Foster City soon. But we'll keep you folks updated on the latest developments around Zoox, but cool stuff there. Another story here that I reported on earlier this week, somewhat surprising to learn about initially. I don't know how we missed this, but it was announced like late last year that AWS was shutting down its RoboMaker robotics development service. So this was a service that offered, simulation and some other fleet management type services mainly used for cloud based robotic simulation. That was really sort of the main attraction to it. But they announced late last year that it was being shut down on September 10. So that was, of 2025, which was just two days ago as of this recording. So I talked to a number of people about this, Mike. I don't know if you ever had talked to anybody or knew of any, companies that used it. But shut down a couple of days ago. And essentially what I learned from talking to a number of folks, including couple of folks who used to work at AWS on the RoboMaker product is that it was just kind of doomed from the start. Unfortunately, one person told me that basically the product was developed for iRobot alone. IRobot, what do they have? 6,000,000 robot vacuums, something like that, that have been deployed around the world. And the interesting thing there is no house is the same, right? Everybody's house looks different, is laid out different, the floors are different, the lighting is different. Every house is unique in its own, which causes challenges for these robots to try to safely and efficiently navigate all these different environments. So what iRobot was looking for was a service that could quickly spin up thousands of random environments in simulation and allow them to test the robots and really generate basic pass fail metrics for those different environments. So Robot Maker was basically invented for them based off what I learned.
00:18:30 · Steve Crowe, Mike Oitzman
What happened was they didn't really do any due diligence with other companies to see, are there other companies out there that need a similar, simulation capability that iRobot does? And I think what they found out over, well, I think it was six, seven years of RoboMaker being in existence is that most companies don't need to generate simulations for, you know, 10,000 different environments, right? If you think about all the locust robots or any mobile robot in a warehouse or robot arm in warehouses, the environments are very, very similar, Right? So they just weren't able to get enough traction. [00:19:08] S1: Yeah. But ironically, we've got humanoids that wanna be deployed in homes. They're gonna need sort of a similar sort of simulation because the homes are all different. I mean, that's a basic truth. But the point was how many robots need to operate in the home? Well, now we've got humanoids that want to operate in home environment.