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Burro’s 2018 demo worked, but the company soon realized that a successful demo is not the same as a reliable product. The gap between controlled demonstrations and real-world deployment is where most robotics companies fail, according to Burro, because they optimized for the wrong thing for too long.
The gap between those two things is where most robotics companies fail. Not because their technology is bad, but because they optimized for the wrong thing for too long.
Burro made a different choice by working in outdoor agricultural settings with no fixed infrastructure, no controlled lighting, and no GPS reliability under canopy. The agricultural workforce was not going to modify its behavior to accommodate a machine, forcing Burro to confront real-world problems immediately. The company learned that people who depend on a robot for their livelihood have zero tolerance for unreliability. Within weeks of adoption, if the system delivers value, the customer’s mental model shifts from seeing it as an interesting tool to expecting dependable performance.
Source: The Robot Report