What to Ask: Robotics & Automation

Written by Bogdan Cristei of Shack15 Ventures and Tim Yang of Tyche Partners.

When meeting with robotics founders, it helps to have a prepared mind. We are sharing the list below to help founders with what questions to expect, and investors with some ideas on what to ask. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, please comment below if we missed anything obvious!

1. Design & Technology
2. Costs & Financials
3. Business Model
4. What To Read

1. Design & Technology

Degree Of Autonomy

• Are you replacing humans with your product or improving human productivity?
• How do you think about teleoperation?
• Are the robots autonomous most of the time?
• When they encounter a problem or obstacle they can’t solve, does a human operator in a teleoperation center manually control the robot remotely? How easy or difficult is the process?
• Pairing fully automated robotic operations with occasional human remote operation of individual robots may make sense
• If more than one robot, can they learn from each other?
• Can they help each other get out of bad situations?
• Think of knowledge transfer between robots, cloud robotics, reinforcement learning, learning based on predictive models

Maintenance

• How is the robot built against the elements?
• Crops or fields for example are tough on hardware and electronics due to environmental conditions like rain, dust and mud
• When a robot breaks down, do you need someone to come on-site to fix it, or can you use a backup and ship the broken one back and forth to be repaired?
• What type of location technology does the robot use? Wifi, Sonar, GPS, Bluetooth, any other microlocation tech?

Adoption

• Does the robot have out of the box autonomy? Does it arrive ready-to-use?
• Does it require a systems integrator, programming, extra hardware, or previous knowledge of robotics?
• How do you think about the user experience as it relates to integration?
• Can it be controlled by an easy-to-use, web, mobile or touch screen interface that enables anyone to train, update, and repurpose?
• Do customers need to retrofit existing facilities to use your robot?
• Would a change in the manufacturing lines require additional hardware and systems integrator costs to modify existing automation solutions?
• What are the key elements that prevented automation in the past few years?
• Does this robot have the potential to be safe enough to use around humans?
• Some best practices already exist, such as speed limit for cobots being 5mph

Data

• How do you and your customer leverage the data generated by the robots to improve future performance?
• Think of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, critical evaluation criterions, edge ecosystems, data processing at the edge
• Can data from robots enhance human decision support?
• Can the robot track and prioritize issues it comes up against, for engineers to solve, and slowly reduce the number of problems the robots can’t solve on their own?

Scalability

• Is the solution modular and/or scalable?
• To upgrade or add functions, do you have to change the fundamental architecture?
• Is your robot developed as a solution for 1 or 2 specific purposes, or as a platform that is upgradable?
• Can you adjust throughput speed based on customer need?
• Can you flex volume or operations up/down?
• On the customer side, there may be a need for excess capacity; they may need to build buffer; in most cases, it is operationally difficult for robotics company to scale up/down
• Are your components largely off the shelf, or do you need to build specific components?
• If this is the V1 version of the product, what does V2 and V3 look like?

2. Costs & Financials

• What is the effective “fully loaded cost” of running the robot vs human
• What is the total cost for: robot training time, upkeep, additional square footage needed, deployment, load balancing, sending robots back for repairs?
• Tell us about your cost modeling, payback time and ROI; what are the metrics you are considering?
• Tell us about how you are comparing robot throughput vs human throughput; what are the variables you are considering?
• Different locations may have different ROI requirements (NY vs LA vs SF)
• Can implementing a robotics strategy reduce other costs like lighting, heating and air conditioning?
• Can the robot act as a subcontractor by itself? Could it in the future?
• Can your robot finish one task from beginning to end, or is it part of a larger process?
• How can you leverage your automation prowess to capture more value?
• Think about cleaning robots becoming cleaning agencies, construction robots becoming general contractors, or ag-tech robots becoming land-owners.
• What would be the cost to customers if there is a failure in your product?

3. Business Model

• Who is your ideal customer?
• How do you quantify your addressable market ?
• Which are the features with highest WTP from customers?
• Are you charging customers on projects/services, units, or RaaS?
• Do we really need a robot to solve this problem?
• It’s easy to get enamored with something that moves or is technically advanced while forgetting that it might be easier to solve said market problem differently
• What’s the alternative solution for the use case?
• Do you have strategic alignments and partnerships with companies that have already developed necessary hardware, components or software?
• If using a service model, is there a way to recover your costs in 6 to 9 months?
• Companies exploring robotics in place of tasks with high labor shortages, such as trucking or agriculture, may be more willing to explore per hour or per unit models
• Is there an opportunity to create a market-defining product or a new market altogether?
• What is the expected delivery time to customer?
• How long does it take to deploy your robotic solution?
• Speed matters more for some industries like grocery or e-commerce
• What’s the benefit of customers using your technology to solve their problems and how do they measure it?
• If applicable, is the robot designed for: first mile (eg warehouse yard), middle mile (eg between warehouses) or last mile (delivery to the customer) ?

4. What To Read

Robotics Business Review
Robotics Business Review provides breaking news, informed opinion and deep analysis focused on the robotics, automation and intelligent systems sector.

Silicon Valley Robotics
Supporting Innovation and Commercialization of Robotics Technologies

The Robot Report
The Robot Report provides robotics news, research, analysis and investment tracking for engineers, technology, and business professionals.