Bad news - consumer robotics is hard. Every consumer has a smartphone, but few have a home robot (robot vacuum cleaners being a welcome exception). Good news - whichever business solves the home robot adoption conundrum stands to benefit greatly, and, perhaps some day, join the Magnificent Seven.
Put simply - with truly due respect for boldly trying - today’s consumer robot products tend to offer a limited value at a steep price. Read on to see what we are doing to take care of the price factor.
Marketing results
In December we put marketing on a backburner in order to focus on the technology, MVP backlog and making the first product version for sale. Also, this allows us to see the difference that our active marketing efforts add on top of the passive, organic word-of-mouth follower growth.
- 1,677 Facebook group subscriber on 12/31/2023 vs. 1,529 one month ago
- 249 YouTube Maker’s Pet channel subscribers as of 12/31/2023 vs 170 one month ago
- 161 Reddit group members
- completed the initial series of build-an-bringup instructions:
- published short-format developer log updates and product teasers
Technology and MVP results
- successfully interfaced a $15 laser distance scan sensor to the product’s Arduino board (but not yet to ROS2) as proof-of-concept and obtained a live data stream
- this development is particularly important since it allows us to bring the product cost-of-parts (and possibly the retail price as well) below $99. Making the product widely affordable is one of our key goals.
- added fully-automatic exploration when creating a map (needs debug)
- tested product with various motor alternatives
- added battery level firmware measurement
- added Raspberry Pi Pico head [extension PCB starter firmware]
- validated extension module interface working with the robot’s master Arduino ESP PCB
- iterated design of the main Arduino ESP32 PCB
- designed the Raspberry Pi Pico head extension PCB
- designed the LDS02RR adapter PCB
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