HBRC General Meeting: Innate Robotics

[camp .]

When: Tomorrow night, Wed May 27 at 7PM West Coast Time

Speaker: Vignesh Anand, Co-founder and CTO Innate Robotics

Abstract: Innate is building the “Personal Robot” — a general-purpose, developer-first robotics platform designed to do for robotics what the personal computer did for software. The company argues that the robotics industry is at the same inflection point computing reached in the early 1980s: the technology is ready, but no one has yet delivered a complete, accessible platform that lets a broad community of builders actually do things with it. This talk covers what makes Innate different from a traditional robotics company: the hardware choices, the software architecture, the research direction, and the reasoning behind each decision.

Innate Robotics

https://www.innate.bot/

Our meetings are hybrid.

This month’s in-person session and presentation is at Maker Nexus, 1330 Orleans Drive, Sunnyvale, CA, 94089

Online @ Zoom: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88326925900

Agenda: Regardless of the topic, all of our general meetings use the following pattern:

1. Industry News
2. Club News
3. I Need Help
4. Show and Tell
5. Presentation
6. Random Access

HomeBrew Robotics Club

https://www.hbrobotics.org/

Thanks,

Camp

[Chris Albertson]

The words "developer-first” caught my eye… 

Because their development system was described as being built on ROS2 but somehow easy to use, I had to look at their GitHub repository.   I agree.   I think they did it.  The target audience is someone who knows C++ but does not want to learn about launch files, or subscribing to messages or parameters servers or any of that “ROS Stuff”.   It seems all you do is write a C++ class that inherits from a base class that does know about “ROS Stuff” and put the source code in the right directory, and then this system makes it happen and loads it into the ROS that is running on the robot.  Unlike “Real ROS”  this system has a trivially simple build system.

This is not targeted to end-users; few of them would be competent C++ developers or even able to use a Linux command line.  I’d like to see this catch on; it does seem like it would flatten the learning curve for ROS development.  But (I think?) only if you are using their robots.

I’m very skeptical.   Can a $2,000 tiny floor bot with one arm economically justify itself?    I have always thought that a robot would have to do a job that you would have otherwise hired out or do a job that you dislike doing.   I don’t think any robot can become mainstream until it is “economically justifiable”.  This robot is either a toy for rich end users or a development platform for C++ developers.    It will not clean your bathroom or unload a truck.

But look at how wrong we all were in the 1980s.  We all thought the “killer app” the app that justifies owning a computer, was spreadsheets and word processing.  It really did look that way for many years.    But now in hindsight, we know the “killer apps” are social media and video games.   Those two things account for maybe 90% of computer use and are the sole reason why most people own computers.   No one would have guessed.

I bet we can’t predict about robots, we will all be wrong.   But my guess about killer robot apps will be "invisible but ubiquitous automation”.  Not just a single robot that you see and interact with.   Laundry gets folded and put away, and Amazon packages get taken indoors, and the kitchen cleans itself, but we don’t notice.  The intelligence is in some box in your closet that is connected to the cloud, and the physical machines (robots) hide in their recharging niches when you are around and come out when you are not there.  The lights turn on and off, and the bathroom stays clean, and you never notice.  Some of the devices don’t need vision because they are tapping the video from security cameras.    Good automation is invisible or at least not noticed.   We will have to wait 40 years to see if I’m right.

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