The Robotics Stack
00:27:04 · Leo
[00:27:04] S1: Yeah. So you mentioned earlier, maybe I misunderstood that you started last year on this project. You seem very advanced for a project that is pretty much one year old. So I'm curious about that. Did you actually start last year? Did you pivot from something else? How many people are you working with? Did you raise money? Because it feels like you have many advanced technologies. Just the face to me looks state of the art. I mean, I've seen companies making face only that don't look as good as yours to be honest from what I've been seeing. So I'm curious about that, like funding, how many people you work with, and how long you have been at it.
00:27:37 · Xara
[00:27:37] S2: So in fact, it was started at the end of last year. It was at the end of November, very close to December. So we've been around for ten months, almost a year now. And we are very lucky to be joined by over 30 plus engineers, all very talented engineers, very young. The average age of company is only 25, and some of them are recent graduates, some of them are are new engineers that's come up with some of the top schools all around the world. So we are super lucky to work with relatively big team of, versatile engineers to make this happen. And, so for the robotics phase, we have developed five generations. Initially, it was really, really bad. As you guys can see, it can only blaze his eyes. But later on, we keep iterating it. And, you know, the surprising part... Let me let me tell you the hardest part about being in this robotic face. The hardest part of being in this robot face was actually not the internal skeleton or the structure. The hardest part is actually the sun con skin, the skin on top of it. Because skin is a... The sun con is a very complex substance, and every single part of the skin has a different kind of width and thickness. For example, since the eyes need to move a lot, the thickness of the sun con skin has to be very, very thin. Otherwise, the actuator cannot move the robotic eyes. So for example, since the mouth has to be very, very flexible. Right? The skin here is also very, very thin. So basically, what we realized that in order to build the most human like robotic face, it's a conjunction, it's a combination of optimizing the skin around the robotic structure, the internal skeleton. And I would say there's no rocket science in this. We did so many experiments. We did hundreds of experiments in order to get the perfect skin width and the thickness, in order to get the perfect structure to combine with the robotic parts to make it look very natural. It was a very difficult process when we first started, but we're very lucky. We started getting, you know, a better and better looking robotic face and also a better better looking robotic body.
00:29:25 · Leo
[00:29:25] S1: How do you hire for such a company? What does the job description look like? How do you vet people? How do you filter them out? How do you make sure the workplace remains, I would say, a safe space for lack of a better word?
00:29:39 · Xara
[00:29:39] S2: Yeah. Thank you for that question. I'll be very honest with you. It was very difficult for us to hire initially. It... It's still very difficult to hire great engineers right now. I think for a few reasons. Number one is that the amount of good robotics engineers all around the world altogether is not that much people. Right? People around the world who really understand robots robotics, I think, is less than 5,000 people. Right? So out of those 5,000 people, a lot of people, because of ethical issues, because of the preference for technology, they don't want to go into intimacy robotics. Right? A lot of them wanna work on more general purpose robots like Unitree Optimus, but in tendency robotics for them is is a very sensitive thing. Right? They're very concerned, you know, what happens if their career associated with Intimacy Robotics. So even though it's very hard for us to hire engineers, but the engineers that we hired, they're super loyal, and we're very lucky to work with them because they really believe in emissions. Every single engineers we hire really believe in the future where humans and machines need to live together side by side. They really believe in the future of human and robots companionships. And they really believe that humans and robots have to coexist in a way so that there's symbiosis. So you mentioned earlier, there's two movie. One is Her and Ex Machina. Ex Machina was actually a very tragic ending because at the end of Ex Machina, the robot awakes and it kills other... The human host. It try to mix itself in the human society, and it could be detrimental to human society if robots are built in a way so that it's not safe. So our company, we really believe in human and machines should live together. And the one of the reason why we go into intimacy and companion because we want to build robots that's safe for humans. Right? We want to build a robot that can be integrated into human's life. And in order to do that, we don't want to enslave the robots. In some way, if you will make robots do all kind of tasks, if you want... You make robots work in an assembly line, in a manufacturing, you make robots doing all kind of household work inside your house, I think that's some form of enslavement.
00:31:33 · Xara, Oskar, Leo
We believe we should build a future where humans and robots should live together in a symbiotic way to have real companionship and connections versus enslaving robots and make them do all kind of different task. We really believe in the missions of human and machine living together. Luckily for us, there's good enough engineers that also believe in missions and they decided to join us and build this incredible machine. And there's third thing I want to note. You said you said you said about job description. Let me show you something very interesting because we we have a job description. We have a job post for testing engineers. The basic engineer who really test the machine and interacts with the machine. We put it out for two days, and we receive 50,000 resumes. [00:32:12] S0: A lot [00:32:13] S2: of people wanna test our machine. Right? Well, and see how it works. [00:32:19] S1: It's not that difficult to hire in the end. It really depends on the job you're advertising, I guess. [00:32:23] S2: You're right. So people... The testing personnel is definitely oversubscribed. Yes. People are super interested in testing the machine. Yes. It's depending on jobs. And other engineers, obviously, is more difficult. Like, the hardest role right now to hire, I would say, is mechanical engineer. And it's really hard to find good mechanical and electrical engineer in order to work in this space.
00:32:23 · Xara, Oskar
[00:32:23] S2: You're right. So people... The testing personnel is definitely oversubscribed. Yes. People are super interested in testing the machine. Yes. It's depending on jobs. And other engineers, obviously, is more difficult. Like, the hardest role right now to hire, I would say, is mechanical engineer. And it's really hard to find good mechanical and electrical engineer in order to work in this space. [00:32:43] S0: As you said, there are some people who are very pro this type of development and have this outlook on the future that we're going to coexist. Now, obviously, there's also another camp. Did you already see some backlash online or people saying like, you you can't do this? I mean, you're not the only one doing this. I think you're very unique in the sense, like, how you do it. But I wanna hear your take, like, to have people who are very pro and maybe people who really don't like it.