Formic CEO Saman Farid contrasts manufacturing automation adoption rates between China and the United States.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Farid: Programming accounts for under 5% of Formic's robot deployment costs
“From the hundreds of robots that we've deployed today, less than five percent of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing.”
Insight
Farid: Robot Form Factor Is Irrelevant if Software Properly Abstracts Motion Control
“To be honest, like the form factor is kind of irrelevant because in all of these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control, right? Like it's actually if you can abstract away the software enough, like all of…”
Insight
Farid: Moving heavy loads at speed is physically impractical for humanoid robots
“If you're picking up a 50 pound box with one of those robots, like it's very likely to tip over pretty easily. Like you need, and if you want to move at any kind of speed, right? Because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it at, you know, five miles an ho…”
Opinion
Farid: China has a huge advantage over US startups in vertical robotics integration
“Like the Chinese, like, I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups like Unitree, for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos, like they have built an entire team to build actuators a…”
Assertion Contradicted
Farid: US factories run under 2,000 hours annually versus 7,500 in China
“The typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than 2000 hours a year. This, the comparable number in China is 7500 hours a year, right? Like there's 8700 possible production hours in a given year. The vast majority of American factories are sitt…”
Insight
Farid: Getting a robot to work is only 10% of robotics deployment
“Getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. 90% of the work is like, how do you do error handling and how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot?”