Robot-as-a-Service

Customers don't buy the robot; they pay by the month or by the amount of work it does.

Robot-as-a-service (RaaS) is modeled on the software industry's SaaS (software-as-a-service): the manufacturer keeps ownership of the robot, and the customer pays monthly, hourly, or by the amount of work completed, while the manufacturer handles maintenance, upgrades, and remote monitoring. It converts a customer's large one-time purchase into a predictable operating expense, lowering the barrier to adoption, while also giving the manufacturer continuous access to deployment data to improve its models. Warehouse and logistics robots adopted this model relatively early, and humanoid-robot companies such as Agility Robotics now also supply robots to factories and warehouses on a RaaS basis. The drawback is that the manufacturer must front the hardware cost, which demands strong cash flow.

ExampleA warehouse uses a fleet of material-handling robots for a fixed monthly fee, and the manufacturer sends someone to fix any that break down.

Also called

RaaS

Related

Robot Rental · Subscription Model · Return on Investment / Payback Period · Scaled Deployment · Deployment Data Backflow

Sources

Robot as a service（Wikipedia）