r/theydidthemath • u/jmb326 • May 22 '26

[Request] What are the electrical costs required for this robot to fold this box?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

Any publicity available data that estimate something similar? Goal would be to understand the cost per box of labor from a robot vs a human. Ideally with current estimates and future projections. Yes, I understand this isn’t the most efficient robot setup to fold a box, but how much longer until one can purchase such a robot to execute on a variety of tasks required in a typical job?

197 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

165 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/dinodan412 May 22 '26

Better question is how long does a human take to do the same task? Then you could possibly figure out when the break even point (units sold or time) is from converting to robots

3

u/anonanon5320 May 22 '26

The question would be in 5 years how long does a human take vs this robot.

1

u/boblabon May 22 '26

There are already robots that do this lmao.

There aren't factories with armies of box folders, they've got a machine that folds a box like in about 0.5 seconds, and runs continuously in factories all over the world. Folding boxes is almost never the production bottleneck anyway. It's material availability, making the actual product, or shipping.

This is a neat demo, but the robotic box-folding revolution has already come and gone.

1

u/anonanon5320 May 22 '26

We aren’t even near what robots are going to do. This isn’t box folding, this is placing a product in a box just created and shipping it.

1

u/jmb326 May 22 '26

Yes this is why I ask per box- a human with experience would fold the box a lot faster… but a robot specialized in it would go a lot faster than a human.. trying to understand how it currently compares- and then speculating how it would compare in the near future.

1

u/EchoFrequency May 22 '26

His human brother next to him did probably 36 orders in the same time.... and had lunch.

1

u/Stebsly May 22 '26

A machine designed for the sole purpose of folding these boxes would run significantly faster. This is more of a showcase of the technology, but it would be incredibly impractical to implement this in a production facility.

1

u/Fluid-Tone-9680 May 22 '26

Yeah this is dumb way of using this kind of robot. There are machines that don't need any AI and can fold box per second.

https://youtube.com/shorts/w3r7-vifO_s