It would seem like such an obvious win-win if these cleaning robotics companies just won a couple of contracts with some tech forward hotel chains.
- Faster R&D since hotel rooms are regular/familiar
- Cost center for hotels so revenue would be higher/straightforward
- No privacy issues since robots would not be present in rooms with guests
- Easier servicing/maintenance since multiple robots at same location
My guess is that they're currently nowhere near robust or effective enough to make that realistic. They need to bootstrap somehow, if only get good enough to convince hotel management that their approach will be realistic in the future.
This is my take too. Hotels wouldn't be happy if a robot knocked a water jar on the carpet, or scratched a wall, but a home owner? We're doing it for free and you asked for it!
Hotel's girl management might be more undertanding than I assume, though.
Basically every AI startup promises the world instead of descoping to something that is achievable and profitable. Easier to scam investors than make a working product.
Also, cleaning kitchens is a huge part of the job. Hotel rooms either have no kitchen or a very minimal one. You're not going to learn how to clean an oven or load a dishwasher in a hotel room. (And loading a dishwasher requires categorizing thousands of things as dishwasher safe or not! Stainless steel skillet, yes; cast iron skillet, no; etc.)
Yeah, this seems like a much more likely option. Get a ton of good, completely unique scans of real world environments you could never replicate in testing and even if your product sucks and you fail entirely, you’ve got a really good dataset to sell to a big company that’s close on a product and needs data to enhance/refine on.
Does not make any sense for them since it’s not a unique environment. You could rent one hotel room or build a cheap replica and get all of your training done in one shot. They’re obviously trying to hit unique environments with many different unforeseen obstacles to overcome.
He means it doesn’t make sense for the startup. The comment you’re replying to, is arguing that this point from the gp is a disadvantage instead of an advantage:
