What It Takes to Deploy Robots

A robot can deliver a package, climb stairs or draw a crowd at a trade show.The harder question is whether it can do a useful job, reliably, at a cost a customer can justify.In the second half of my conversation with Robot.com’s Felipe Chavez, we talked about advertising, a robot dog with wheels, and what the company has learned from putting robots into customers’ hands.The thread connecting those subjects was deployment: everything that has to work around a robot for the robot itself to make economic sense.“You need to deploy in order to learn,” Chavez said.Advertising helps pay for the robotOne example is R-Ads, Robot.com’s platform for human-robot interaction.At conferences and trade shows, people can interact with the robots, open their compartments and take merchandise. Chavez said several companies have used the robots at their events.This video shows people interacting with Kiwi robots set up for interactions where people can interact, open the compartment and take merchandise. Video has no sound and loops.On college campuses, advertising serves another purpose: it creates an additional revenue stream that can help lower the cost to customers.“That allows us to have better unit economics,” he said.That is a practical answer to a difficult question. Making a robot more affordable does not necessarily depend entirely on making the hardware cheaper. It can also mean finding additional ways for the same machine to generate revenue.But the experience matters, too. Chavez said the company is being careful to make those interactions feel natural and enjoyable.A robot sharing space with people has to earn their acceptance alongside its revenue.More capability comes at a costR-Dog tackles a different set of delivery problems.According to Chavez, the robot can bend to drop a package in front of a house and climb stairs to reach a door. It has both legs and wheels.It could also get into an autonomous car, opening the possibility of combining a vehicle’s longer-distance travel with a robot’s ability to reach the doorstep.“That’s something that our customers are very, very eager to test,” Chavez said.The distinction matters: this is a use case customers want to test. Its commercial value still has to be demonstrated.And those additional capabilities have a price. Chavez said R-Dog is more complex and more expensive than the company’s R-Kiwis, which is why it targets a different market. He said commercial deployment is planned for 2027.That tradeoff gets to a central question in robotics: which capabilities does a particular job justify paying for?The work starts after the demoAsked about the biggest lesson he has learned, Chavez moved quickly from robot capabilities to the business of operating them.“You need to actually prove the ROI to your customer,” he said.Then he listed what that entails:“You need to finance a robot, then you need to maintain the robot, then you need to pay for the on-field operations, then you need to also collect the money, then you need to renew your contracts and sign multi-year contracts.”“That’s when you learn a lot.”It is the less photogenic side of robotics, and a consequential one.An impressive demonstration can show what a machine is capable of. A deployment reveals what it takes to keep that machine useful—and whether a customer will keep paying for it.Chavez described REMI, the company’s robot orchestration intelligence, as part of that work: gathering data, supporting preventive maintenance and autonomy supervision, and improving the company’s own models and third-party models.Deployment also changes the hardware.“The first product that you launch normally is not going to be the final form factor,” he said.Customer experience helps determine what the next version should become.The next test is implementationWhen asked what we would be discussing a year from now, Chavez answered:“We’re going to be talking about implementation.”He said customers are setting up teams and expects larger robotics budgets to follow in 2027. With that spending will come questions about results.“Where is their ROI? How is implementation going?”His expectation is that robots will deliver value. The competition, as he sees it, will be over which companies and which form factors deliver that value most efficiently.There is a human dimension to implementation, too.Chavez pointed to the eyes and rounded forms of Robot.com’s machines. As ro