I’ve owned my D7 for a few years. To suddenly shut off support for a fairly costly product is utterly bad business and unacceptakble. Vorwerk and Neato have proven themselves to be irresponisble players.

You have the main 2 encoders in the industry which are absolute and incremental encoders. Robots use incremental encoders to mark their orientation.

I’m sure the mom and pop shop in a small town won’t be able to afford the $250,000 cost of the tirerobot. Especially if one the reason they can’t find help is low pay. And if they aren’t answering the phone at the shop because they are in the middle of repairs, yet can’t find a mechanic to hire. Then I think they need to hire someone to take the calls, not buy a custom built tire changing robot that is going to increase both their electricity bill and their liability insurance. Also, the tire robot is most likely not going to be very effective when working on cars that are more that 15 years old, been up and down the gravel roads and have 2 different sized lug nuts on each wheel with 3 of them rounded off or cross threaded. It’ll do much better with the city slickers car that is less than 8 years old and gets an automatic car wash at least once a week.