Whenever a company writes a press release with a large sounding number in it my first question is "Is that a lot?". I have no idea how much it costs to run a robotics lab. As this is over the next five years, what would an average of $200m/year actually buy you? Is that a team of 50 very clever people working on cutting edge stuff, or is it 5 interns and a really expensive patent lawyer?
Headline numbers are designed to appeal to our "Crumbs, I wish I was a billionaire!" instincts, but without the context of what's being invested in and the domain knowledge of how much the industry typically spends, this could be awesome or it could be entirely non-newsworthy. I don't know.
To give some context, a new automotive assembly plant could cost around a billion[1]; or an old plant could be modernized with a billion[2] -- It is well within the realm of a normal capital expenditure of an auto company.
Industrial Automation is more expensive than you may imagine. A robot arm may be 100k to 200k or even more (hard to cite as prices are never listed on the internet); you also have to have a controller (PLC) and all of the associated sensors and connections.
We already have heavy duty robots capable of high precision positioning; the area for expansion / improvement is in making these cheaper, and in "Internet of Things" style automation.
Modern factories are heavily automated in the body welding processes and paint application.
The only area of the plant unconquered by robotics is General Assembly, where all the fiddly bits are put on - wire harness, carpet pad, carpet, etc. Robots are famously bad at handling bendy things. [3]
A PhD student gets something like 2500 Euros before taxes per month where I did my PhD. So it costs the institute maybe 40-50k a a year to fund one PhD student's salary. Let's say 100k including office space and some hardware to play with. 200 Million pays for many PhD students.
Yes, but for graduating PhD students 175k-225k/year is roughly market (base) rate for people with proven understanding and ability in the most relevant areas (i.e. multiple publications in top conferences like ICML/NIPS/CVPR/ICCV/ICRA/RSS/etc).
Though, a billion dollars will still pay for quite a few of those.
I think that depends a lot on the location. I know a couple of people who do PhDs in Japan and they are a lot less well paid than German PhD students. I expect that this difference persists even after they graduate.
Very true. These are rates in the SF Bay Area and NYC. IDK what it's like elsewhere, though I've been told it's possible to get offers in this range in London too.
Headline numbers are designed to appeal to our "Crumbs, I wish I was a billionaire!" instincts, but without the context of what's being invested in and the domain knowledge of how much the industry typically spends, this could be awesome or it could be entirely non-newsworthy. I don't know.