In-house manufacturing lets 1X iterate in four weeks

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 9:17

   process been like going from the first one to like the first 10 to the first 100 and what have been the biggest bottlenecks along that journey so to some extent we're a bit lucky and like the system has been designed from day one for manufacturability so even if you think about like this is a tech tree and how do we choose to build robots it's a bit different so while you normally would have like kind of normal motors which aren't that strong so now you need very complex gear systems these gear systems introduces a lot of like energy and other artificial dynamics into the system that nature doesn't have so now you need a lot of sensors and high speed control and all things to kind of mask this you're kind of like fighting physics we've taken a very different approach so we have some very capable motors we develop in-house and also

2. 10:03

   manufacture that allows us to do these tendon drives and they're drastically simpler actually so not just more performant but drastically simpler like less parts less complexity less tolerances less sensors and all things are going to go wrong so the system is quite manufacturable in that sense now the downside of course is that since this is a new type of system there's no supply chain for this so we have to manufacture all of it ourselves um and that's taken us a decade right like the company is 11 years old now so we we really had to kind of like climb the maturity ladder of these production processes but now that that is getting quite mature it's really a superpower because we do it all in-house here so whenever anything happens we can just go back and iterate very fast and make sure we fix it upstream so i think the most

3. 10:48

   important metric we have right now is we use about four weeks from we do like major changes on the full system in cad until a new robot walks off the line and it took us a decade to kind of build that momentum where we can iterate so fast on the hardware but that allows us to take the feedback from the line you know and feed that back into engineering and iterate in about four weeks so So then you can really, really, really kind of like tune in your manufacturing process.

4. 11:15

   So you pick off any mistakes that's done in like assembly or anything that's hard to do with respect to quality, yield, calibration, all these things down the line. But there's no like secret sauce. You just need to like grind through all these problems. And in the end, you really cross your fingers that you're going to run out of problems. If you just fix enough of them, you're going to run out of problems.

5. 11:34

   Do you still believe? Yeah, I still believe. but like since that's kind of the only way to do it then you just need to be able to really benchmark yourself on like how quickly can I iterate because that's how quickly I can kind of like turn through these problems and we see less and less problems so there's seems to be going in the right direction so sooner or later we'll run out of the problems when you're like starting to