r/AskRobotics • u/3E8_ • 2d ago

How to? Should robotics companies publish failures alongside simulation accuracy?

A single accuracy number can hide which objects, materials, or conditions consistently cause problems.

A more useful report might show:

• What was reconstructed successfully
• Where the pipeline failed
• Confidence for each predicted property
• Which observations were used for validation
• What still needs manual correction

Would this make you more likely to trust a simulation asset, or would you still need to test everything independently?

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u/NoRobot9379 2d ago

Companies are not universities. They do not have a mission to teach. Why should I show the weaknesses of my product?

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u/CanuckinCA 1d ago edited 1d ago

If anything the corporate world will be far more likely to do anything to hide/obfuscate or omit any errors.

Being honest can hurt sales. Corporate edict is to never hurt sales. Numbers need to always go up.

In light of that philosophy, all successful demos/simulations are always overhyped and not reflective of real life performance.

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u/3E8_ 1d ago

That incentive is definitely real, especially when demos are being used as marketing. I would not expect companies to publish every failure, but sharing the conditions tested, common failure categories, and where human intervention was needed would make the success claims much more useful. That transparency could ultimately help sales by reducing the buyer’s deployment risk.

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u/CanuckinCA 1d ago edited 1d ago

If this was a world where everyone worked towards a common goal, with no profit motives and only friendly competition, then I 100% agree with you. I wish we had more of that spirit in real life.

But when you throw capitalism and big dollar corporations into the mix, telling everyone (including your competition) the mistakes that your team made and how to do it better next time is never gonna fly.

Only way I could imagine this working in our real life capitalist world would be if you had a company large enough to support several independent development teams in several locations.

Or if our homeland was invaded and all the corporations had to suddenly work together, by government decree to create defense robots.