The company "Hirebotics" has a name that actually describes the business model (the offering) quite precisely: It is basically a temporary employment agency for robots, which are used wherever very monotonous, repetitive, sometimes dangerous work is performed. The CTO of Microsoft, Kevin Scott, tells about this company in his book "Reprogramming the American Dream" (publication year: 2020).

The recipe for Robots as a Service or RaaS is quite simple: robots are becoming ever cheaper, at the same time cloud services are available everywhere, and then there's the availability of easy-to-use tools for programming robots. These tools include the open source software "Robot Operating System" (ROS); the digital corporation Google operates Google's Cloud Robotics Core, also an open source platform for setting up and operating robotics applications. Among the other players in this market are Amazon, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Kuka, Microsoft, Honda. Typical applications include department stores and logistics.

A nice practical example can be found in the mentioned book by Kevin Scott: "When a customer hires a six-axis robotic arm from Hirebotics to help with one of their processes, programming the arm usually takes a few days, while designing a task-specific manipulator, i.e., a hand that allows the robot to do the intended task, might take several weeks." (p. 192f)

Author

The author is a manager in the software industry with international expertise: Authorized officer at one of the large consulting firms - Responsible for setting up an IT development center at the Bangalore offshore location - Director M&A at a software company in Berlin.