And from a consumer point of view - a very technical person could probably pull off something similar to this, but the amount of hours a project like this would take a single person is probably in the hundreds and you would not approach the quality of this unless you invested a lot of money into equipment (assuming you don't own high quality 3d printers and other things required to build this).
Bittle was also born from our crowdfunding project on Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle in 2020.
You can read about our history there.
In addition to the points you raised, one of the big challenges is to manage the supply chain and the bill of materials. For example, during covid, we faced the challenges of chip shortage.
For any hobbyist project, people don't really need to worry about things at scale.
The price of Pizza at your local non-fast-food restaurant is also significantly higher than that of the bulk raw ingredients it's made of. Now also try adding the R&D costs of inventing the Pizza to that see where that gets you.
Just try designing these up to first partial prototype and try calculating cumulative man-hour spent x local minimum wages x highly optimistic sales^-1 = pure R&D cost per unit before any manufacturing or even design reviews. It's not going to make a lot of commercial sense.
3D printing people sometimes says dollar stores makes them feel defeated. I'm not yet at that level but it's true, a 10-pack ball point pens at $1 makes very little sense if you knew.
We already had a prototype with 3 degrees of freedom on the legs. But the structural complexity and price would have increased substantially. We are not releasing it at this moment.
You can check Petoi robot joint index documentation at https://docs.petoi.com/petoi-robot-joint-index
https://www.hiwonder.com/products/puppypi?variant=3977603314...
The value of this platform comes from the R&D, scale, support, packaged software, etc, etc.
Assuming they sell 10000 units at an average ~$300. At that scale likely a $100 of each unit is in parts/tooling, then assembly/flashing/testing. That's approximately $20mn to be split by:
1. Likely minimum team of 10 people on development for 4 years, at ~$100k per year (with overheads), for $4mn. Kickstarter in 2020: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/petoi/bittle
2. Investors probably threw in $4mn along the way and look to claw that back (couldn't find investment info on a quick search).
3. Tax appears to be ~20% in most places, so 20% of $30mn is $6mn.
Leaving approximately $6mn, everybody gets a bump and they are left with enough to expand and run the company for ~2-4 years without needing to raise additional investment. That's a lot of pressure to get a new product out there.
Some of the videos look really impressive, such as the back flips, climbing stairs and the lidar
> $1,600.00 USD
> Shipping costs $399 per unit, Remote Countries $500-$1000
> Not include customs duties, Please comply with local customs laws pay customs duties and clear the goods
By the time you are done, you will be paying between $2000 and $3500 for the base model. It might still represent good value, but it's still more than it is advertised.
Do they send it by pack mule or something?
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/a2vNP3w_460svav1.mp4
Also CGI?
Now, what about an updated meow/purr version for us cat lovers?:)
He can also code some simple commands to move servos just with the mobile app: https://docs.petoi.com/mobile-app/controller#customized-comm...
He can even make a Petoi robot sing some melodies: https://docs.petoi.com/applications/melody-creation
