The $1/Hour Worker: Four Robotics CEOs on Humanoids at Home, China's Threat, and the End of Dangerous Jobs

**Jonathan Hurst** (0:00)
Hey, everybody.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
It's your boy, J-Cal. I'm here in Paris, France, at a conference called Makina. Basically, AI in the real world.
Thanks for tuning in, and let's get started.
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**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (1:30)
It's an inspection solution. It's about data collection and understanding and critical infrastructure.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:35)
But the form factor is?

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (1:36)
A four-legged robot, a four-legged or a dog, as you've just said.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:39)
We like to call it a dog-o-bot, but why did that dog format become the standard? You're not the only person making it. There's many people making it now. Why did that one become the first one to hit a relative scale and forward deployment?

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (1:59)
In nature, a lot of animals have four legs, so there's a reason to that. For sure, you have a great mobility, you can climb stairs, you can go anywhere a person can go.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:07)
So dexterity and balance.

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (2:09)
Mobility, right? Balance, but also stability. Four legs, if you're wide footprint, a lot of footholds hold on to, because we work in nasty environments. Slippery floors, there's rain foaming, there's snow falling down, grass growing.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:22)
Got it.

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (2:22)
So four legs is a real good format.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:24)
Well, now this is a silly question, but why don't we make Senators for the human versions? When people are making the Optimus, the NEO, the Atlas from Boston Dynamics, those stand-up robots with two legs, the concern is they're always going to fall over, they constantly fall over in demos, and if they fall over, they're going to break somebody's ankle. Why not put four legs on those?

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (2:47)
You could, absolutely, and it really depends on the use case. If you need to work, bring, I don't know, in a coffee shop, bring it to you, and there's narrow spaces, right? You want to work in eye level, maybe you will notice better. In the facilities that we work, four legs stability, there's enough space to go around, it's the perfect format.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:03)
I don't buy it. I think all the cafes should have... Were they Senators in Greek mythology?

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (3:08)
It's a Senator. So four legs and two legs.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:11)
I think that should be the new standard. You found a really effective first use case, which is inspecting really important infrastructure, and now you have thousands of these, hundreds of these for deployed over the last five years. These are expensive. They're low hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy them and to operate them, I'm assuming tens of thousands a year in service contracts. So they're not for home use.
These are industrial and they have a lot of sensors on them. So if you were going to inspect, I don't know, a pipeline with natural gas in it, these things can go out in any weather and they can sense things on that pipeline that a human can't, correct?

**Dr. Péter Fankhauser** (4:00)
Yeah, that's right. For us, it's not about labor replacement, right? It's what can we do better? What can we do superhuman? Inspection is a great example. Our eyes and ears don't perceive all the signals. Micro gas leakages, temperature equipment overheating, with the cameras on the robot, thermal cameras, acoustic microphones, gas concentrations and all of that. We pack it full of sensors and AI, and you can go way beyond what a human can do. So the monetary benefit is avoiding downtime. These assets, if they stop, they lose revenues in hundreds of thousands per hour. So every minute, every hour we can save them, essentially pays for the robot. So that's why we can afford having really expensive sensors, really expensive GPUs on top of the robot.