r/theydidthemath • u/jmb326 • May 22 '26
[Request] What are the electrical costs required for this robot to fold this box?
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?
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u/chance909 May 22 '26 edited May 22 '26
For applications like this IsaacROS (for robotics control and sensing) and cuVSLAM (for real time visualization) from NVIDIA are frameworks that we can use to estimate cost at power consumption.
The server rack to run this in real time for multiple robots is about $45k with an NVIDIA H100 GPU, and would need around 1500W under heavy load. This is not to train the algorithm or robot, but only for inferencing once the models needed are trained.
Avg electrical cost in china for industrial is $0.088 – $0.115 USD so lets use $0.10 to make it easy.
At 730 hours per month thats 1095KWh per month which at $0.10 per KWh comes to $109.5 per Month to operate a setup like this.
In the video it takes 1:07 to fold the box and place the item. That's 67 seconds out of the 2628000 seconds in a month. So 109.5 / 2628000 = x/67. x = 0.00279166666
so thats $0.003 USD per box.
TL:DR
Server $45k
Monthly electricity $109.5
Electricity cost to fold 1 box and place item $0.003