I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)
I'm on a similar journey. I took flight 6 weeks ago and built a turn based board engine for human/agent delivery teams called Keel https://www.spoke.sh/keel. The grand vision is to apply the board engine as a control mechanism for work to be done and verified in deployed robot fleets.
Helping people enhance is a good thing!
Very strong disagree; a lot of people is objecting. A job on an assembly line may be "bad" for somebody, but for somebody else can be a lifeline, if they won't be able to find another job soon enough and/or in reasonable conditions. Long-term, the job market can rebalance (and if unemployed people are supported in their education, it's great), but short-term displacement is a serious issue.
"Robots" broadly defined are getting more capable and more intelligent at a significantly faster rate than humans are.
This obviously produces incredible economic surplus, but 1) that surplus is naturally captured by the owners of those robots and not the people they replaced, and 2) doesn't seem clear that all the negative consequences of mass obsolescence are solvable by economic surplus even in theory.
I ask you to follow your premise to it's conclusion... who's paying for it these robots and who buys the stuff the robots make? Other robots?? In this world where robot serves robot, where exactly did we disappear to?
Yes, an economy is perfectly capable of orienting itself around satisfying the wants of the few people who have a lot of capital at the expense of the many who have little capital. Why wouldn't this be possible?
It obviously creates systemic risk in the economy, which is one of many reasons it should be mitigated by policy and taxation, but I'm not sure why you're acting like it's some mathematical impossibility.
Not sure anyone said anything about humans "disappearing," just driven to extreme economic hardship despite ample overall productivity, which again we have literally hundreds of real world examples of throughout history.
I'm glad I did it though. We have to few years on this earth to spend our energies hurting others.
Don't you live in a nation state that uses violence to maintain the order that you've come to enjoy? Here's a harsh dose of reality for ya, suffering is unavoidable... the trick is convincing the worker class that it's easier to just cooperate
I'm from a western country originally though, sure. Can't think of any wars we've been in during my lifetime that have done me much good. All wars of choice and aggression.
therefore it makes no sense to consider one's own role in producing, mitigating, or directing suffering in the world
i am very smart
/s
I hope you are able to convince some of your colleagues to do likewise.
With robotics and AI, it feels like there are a lot of directions it could go that would lead to higher quality of life and not just temporary advantages for killing other people.
Won't be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of humanoid robots strapped up with explosives running to their target or some of them flying to their target with drones attached.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-exoskeleton-test-bat...
Cakes exist and I even like them, and I do not choose to work at a bakery.
All the drone warfare developments remind me of the introduction of tanks during the first world war and perfected by the second world war. In the space of a few years they changed warfare. Then planes changed warfare again. Now drones. Makes you wonder what the next thing will be
Which of course leads to point 2: it's very easy to take a moral stance on weapons when you don't think you're in any danger, nor going to be doing any of the fighting otherwise.
Rather than blowing up a school full of little girls, you could deploy a swarm of thousands of fast-moving cat-sized robots armed with tasers and bolas to identify and capture targeted enemy leaders.
I've been using AI heavily to do this, so everything is in ROS2 since it's "standard" and AIs have pretty good training for it. I can see how it's annoying and suboptimal if you're writing manually and after a more integrated system, but it's been pretty good for getting up and running because it's "standard" and kinda plug and play. I see why you'd want to rewrite it for production, the endless processes and nodes and startup processes can get annoying
One of the more useful things I've done so far is actually not robotics related directly, it's a Godot based "game" with a ROS bridge that lets me drive the robot from Foxglove, which I will eventlly get a vlm based agent to drive. Seems much easier and faster than Issac Sim for getting started with.
There are many open source solutions out there: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-forms/?license=ope... I recommend if you can choose any of privacy friendly options, thanks and have a nice day.
I’d be wary of a founder with such bad NIH
It would be like writing your own email servers or calendar software. It would be a distraction at best.
Write a form in .md (even tell an llm to do it) and just put it online.
Web forms are simple like that slack notification thing is simple.
Using a survey like this is IMO not ideal though.
One doesn't need to compromise on one's values to earn.
I was in the past in the position of working for a corporation I personally consider to be vile, damaging to the world and society. Took me about 3 years to move elsewhere. I was not in the position to just quit, both due to finances and due to visa requirements.
I don't fault the common man for having to put up with things. But I will commend those that have the fortitude to at least turn and walk away.
Virtue signaling > vice signaling every day :)
Just like the OP’s post where he claims a moral high ground but then proceeds to feed the monster he created.
Why not just skip the fake bs and just say he’s going to make something cool?
Then again, engineers built the Death Star in Star Wars. I’m sure it was interesting work.
I knew about BD's history with DARPA, of course. The issue was that my company was doing some actually really interesting non-defense work, and then decided to pivot and mount teleoperated weapons on these platforms for a new demo. That’s when I submitted my resignation :)
Human emotions and reasoning could be internally inconsistent and conflicting, yet everything is as it should be, counter-intuitively.
But as expected, others have taken their place [2]. Guilt-tripping a single non-monopoly proving useless again.
[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/news/general-purpose-robots-shoul...
[2]: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260323PD219/military-bosto...
That’s just marketing bs in the same vein as “Your privacy is very important to us.”. It means nothing.
The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai.
Boston Dynamics' business is, basically, "mobility platforms." After all these years the basic development is all done; now they're pivoting to commercial markets.
There's no real difference between a "murderbot" and, say, a police riot-control platform, a fire-fighting platform, a forestry platform, etc.
They might not be explicitly developing weapon packages any more, but there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms.
Only way to solve this is DRM. War machine (or even intimidation tool) creations on their platforms is a Terms of Use violation [1]
[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/blog/an-ethical-approach-to-mobil...
He said he worked with their hardware, not that he worked for Boston Dynamics.
Entirely possible to be working with a platform provided by Boston Dynamics at a company that is not engaged in weapons development.
Sure, Boston Dynamics is a bit more obvious there, but merely having DARPA funding doesn't mean it's about killing people.