As someone who makes things it always confuses me when millions just disappear whenever a company or government contractor makes things. Give me $17M and I'll build a vacuum robot prototype in under 2 years, I can't imagine 10 engineers getting paid $100+k/year can't do it in less time? Tooling is expensive, but not THAT expensive...
I would agree. CNC-ing POM also tends to work extremely well for prototype plastic parts.
Also, I already built a robot arm, a robot car, and a custom camera in my free time. So I’m having a hard time imagining that a robot vacuum prototype wouldn’t be possible for me to build in a year, let alone with the team size that $1m in annual salaries buys.
Get it approved in a lot of large markets? Deal with ongoing supply issues as suppliers change and you need to maintain your product? Market it? I could keep going on, but making a prototype is the easy part, making a sustaining business out of it is the hard part.
