Things I’ve learned as a consultant to robotics companies.
Today marks 12 years since I walked into a robotics lab called CAST and started working on a humanoid with a great team.
Since then, I’ve worked with 22 robotics companies and been involved in 31 robotics projects. Mostly design and interaction, but also market intelligence, systems architecture, and strategy. The last 5 years through MERPHI, before that, individually.
Accumulated unpaid invoices: ~€60k.
Yes, clients go bankrupt. In robotics, this is not an edge case. It’s a feature.
I’ve never been employed full-time by a robotics company. Or any company. I’ve always been a consultant, and that’s my safe zone.
You see things as a consultant that you simply don’t see otherwise. One fun one, maybe not: I often know when someone is about to quit or get fired before others do. Patterns are patterns.
Anyway. Here are a few things that actually matter:
Requirements
Robotics companies often struggle with setting clear requirements early on. Totally understandable. Most requirements depend on application and context of use, which are fuzzy by nature.
But the older I get, the more I realize I don’t get paid to work around perfect requirements. I get paid to make them explicit. If everything is well-defined, AI can probably do it better. That should worry you.
Time
As a consultant, you’re expected to save time. Reality is more non-linear. You bring new ideas, new constraints, and uncomfortable questions. That often slows things down.
The trick is not saving time everywhere. It’s saving time where it actually matters.
Communication
As an external consultant, you’re never fully in the loop. Robotics changes fast, and if you’re not inside, you will miss things. I talk to C-levels and I talk to interns.
You need a mechanism for this. A close ally inside the company helps. For communication, and for what comes next.
Change
Change is not a bug in robotics projects. It’s the operating system. Everything changes until the last minute.
The older I get, the more I adapt to uncertainty. This is unintuitive, but if you don’t adapt, you won’t survive.
Last for now: Help them
What I do on the side is connecting clients to customers, talent, investors and more. This is the most enjoyable part for me.
Robotics doesn’t grow in isolation. It grows as an ecosystem. We should all act like it.
