Hardware development has always operated on the Battleship model: Engineers try something new. It’s probably a miss. And then they try again and again until they finally get that hit.

The future of hardware is the exact opposite, Autodesk CEO Carl Bass said at the HAXLR8R hardware accelerator demo day Monday. With the advance of computer modeling, there is a future where engineers can arrive at a fully functional design on the very first try. Pair that with a dramatic drop in costs for the materials needed to build a physical object, and we will find ourselves in a world where hardware is affordable for anyone to make.

In the meantime, hardware accelerators are helping to ease the process from idea to prototype to commercial product. HAXLR8R’s latest class of 10 startups presented Monday at the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco. Their products ranged from an industrial cleaning robot to a 3D printer…