Whether a robot deploys
is about more than hardware price

I’ve knocked around the robotics industry for the better part of two decades, and I’ve met no end of customers — that hungry look in their eyes, as if what I’m selling were some miracle elixir: one sip and the labor shortage, the burnout, the sagging efficiency and low utilization all melt away. But I’ve watched the same play too many times: dazzle in the demo, beg for mercy once it’s installed.

Many assume that if the hardware is just cheap enough, more people can afford a robot. But the hardware price is often only the tip of the iceberg — shipping costs money, installation and setup cost money, maintenance costs money; and the hidden cost that truly gives pause — building a custom system so the robot will actually do as it’s told. Until those costs come down, service robots will never get their shot at deploying at scale.

Price is only one problem. Reliability and after-sales upkeep are the bigger one.

So Sigma chose a different path. We don’t build ourselves on a fundraising deck — we build on use cases that actually run. We really do patrol facilities through the long night, checking fire and electrical safety, and we can switch what it inspects on the fly; we really do round the wards of care homes, measuring breathing and heart rate, watching for residents who are restless or out of bed; and in robot logistics, we walk into the cramped corners where the signal is poor — and hold ourselves to deploying in a single day. These were all problems that used to be hard to handle, but we’re now confident we can get them done.

And reliability and after-sales upkeep? That’s exactly where we care most — and where we’ve prepared our answer. In the age of AI, we believe source code shouldn’t be a tightly guarded secret, but knowledge to be shared — we even go a step further and hand MCP and SKILL documentation to AI models to draw on, so the software can be maintained for the long run. On the hardware side, we’ve also reached an agreement with the manufacturer for a four-year warranty.

That’s our promise: the best value, end to end. Not the cheapest hardware — a complete plan, thought through from rollout to day-to-day operation.

The future is already here. Put it to work today.

— Snaken, Founder, Sigma Robotics