I focused on customer feedback about robots getting stuck, leading to designing larger wheels and higher ground clearance for better mobility.
Mhmm. Yeah. I think that's that's sort of like, you know, almost like six years ago. We haven't, like, swayed from those design decisions. Looking at the, you know, so okay.
Taking even a further step back. I personally, along with a few other people, we reached out and and we talked to a lot of people. Right? So I I might have interviewed, like, around 60 to 80 customers before we started even, like, putting pen to paper, doing a single sketch, doing any kind of CAD drawings or anything of that sort. And one thing that almost everybody sort of echoed, people who've used RoboVax of many different kinds, is that the biggest pain point is that the robot gets stuck all the time.
People might say it differently. Some might say the robot got lost. Some might say the robot got stuck. Some might say the robot never makes it back to the dock. What they're saying is you basically need to go and rescue the robot.
And it's obvious why that is painful. You buy a robot so that it can take over the cleaning task from your plate And so that it just happens and hopefully you don't have to worry about it. But then you buy a robot and then the robot out of like, you know, three times it does cleaning twice, it gets stuck somewhere. It kind of defeats the entire purpose of having a robot. Now if you start to unpack that entire problem, there's a lot of reasons why robots either don't make it to the dock or get lost or get stuck somewhere.
And a large portion of that is software. So robots don't really understand before Matic. So there's a pre Matic and a post Matic. So before Matic, robots didn't really understand what the three d sort of milieu is in which they're operating. They don't really have a spatial understanding.
They also don't have a semantic understanding. So they don't know what is a carpet, what is a carpet tassel, what is an iPhone wire. And all of these things can be hazards where if the robot goes over it in a certain direction or in a certain way, it can get stuck on it. But at the same time, hardware is also the problem. You could have the best driver on the planet.
You give them a sedan and ask them to climb up a mountain, their sedan's not gonna make it. They need an SUV. Right? So so that's where the hardware picture comes in. And and that's what I love about robotics going back to the previous point.
Like, everything's interconnected. So we knew that, hey, like, you know, software will help us a lot. But we also need to build the hardware which allows the the sort of like, you know, the brain of the robot to be able to drive anywhere within the home. And so that's where we started looking into the problem of how do we build a mobility system that just never gets stuck. The obvious answer, nothing too too creative there is to just build a bigger wheel.
It turns out like that's a very good answer. You just get to keep your complexity low So I can show the side view of the robot. So, you know, I wanna say, like, 80% of the side profile is covered by the wheel. Right? And so these are these huge chunky wheels.
I think from a straight technical perspective, I think the wheel could have been a little bit smaller and it would still go over all sorts of carpets, thresholds. You know, you you have your baby gates that people have in in their homes. The robot is very capable of going over them even with a slightly smaller wheel. Definitely not with the kind of wheels that you would see on your standard Robobac. I would say like the diameter of the wheels out there is probably 50%, forty to 50% of what our wheel is.
And we conducted testing. Just buy like regular carpets out of Home Depot, put them on the floor and try to get your Roomba, your Roborock to climb on it. And it just doesn't matter how you approach it. So we knew we needed to size up the wheel but then we kept going because we just love the look of it. We just love how it just communicates so much confidence and it shows that the robot is here and ready to take on any challenge.
That's sort of like what goes into the front wheels. We decided not to build a suspension into the robot. The reason to build a suspension would be to deal with the problem called high centering. So imagine an obstacle, a sock for example, that gets under the chassis of the robot. It can prop up your robot in a way that both drive wheels are not making contact with the ground.
And so what a suspension does is it can lower down your wheel and still allow it to make contact with the ground and so that it can shimmy itself out of that position. However, the other solution, which we also like, is you just raise the floor. You just increase the clearance of the robot from the ground. That to us was just a lot more elegant. Don't want to keep trying to get stuck and then trying to unstuck yourself.
We just decided we were going to build a bigger robot which is a whole topic in itself which maybe we can talk about in a second. But yeah, choosing to build a bigger robot with bigger wheels with higher ground clearance just helps go around and go over obstacles without getting It definitely does a really good job of avoiding obstacles. But, you know, it's a robot. It eats battery. Yes.