Appendix D
Twenty Questions to Ask Anyone Selling You Robotics
about 1 minutes
- What is your MTBF, and over how many hours?
- What is your human intervention rate in deployment, and is it trending down?
- How many hours of data do you have, and across how many environments?
- What fraction of your data is failures?
- Is your success rate measured by the authors or by blind evaluators?
- How many rollouts per task-policy pair?
- Does your policy output joint torques, or poses that a hand-written controller executes?
- If you claim cross-embodiment transfer, how different were the embodiments kinematically?
- What is your revenue per deployed robot per year?
- Who is your largest customer, and what share of revenue are they?
- Are your orders binding, or milestone-contingent?
- Is your demand from operators, or from labs, integrators and demonstration projects?
- What is your actuator supply chain, and where is it?
- Which of the nine theses in Chapter 11 does your business model require to be true?
- What would falsify your thesis?
- If simulation is central, what is your contact model, and how was it validated?
- If human video is central, how do you recover actions and forces?
- If teleoperation is central, what is your cost per demonstration hour?
- What safety standard do you certify against, and does it cover your form factor?
- What is the smallest task you cannot do, and why?