Boston Dynamic’s robots are works of art - the pinnacle of engineering - but its all designed movement. By this I mean the control systems, their movement plans - it is built and designed by experts in their field. It’s not quite as simple as “go from A to B and do some parkour on the way”. There’s a very large gap between “what is mechanically possible to do” and “Just let the robot figure out how to do that”.

Mechanically we’re ahead of software for manipulation and kinodynamic planning.

I’m actually working on this problem right now for my master’s capstone project. I’m almost done with it; I can have it generating a series of steps to try and fetch me something based on simple objectives like “I’m thirsty”, and then in simulation fetching me a drink or looking through rooms that might have a fix, like contextually knowing the kitchen is a great spot to check.

There’s also a lot of research into using the latest advancements in reasoning and contextual awareness via LLMs to work towards better more complicated embodied AI. I wrote a blog post about a lot of the big advancements here.

Outside of this I’ve also worked at various robotics startups for the past five years, though primarily in writing data pipelines and control systems for fleets of them. So with that experience in mind, I’d say we are many years out from this being in a reasonable product, but maybe not ten years away. Maybe.

deleted by creator

A light week for me, mostly going through some more ROS2/webots tutorials where I can. If anyone has good resources to recommend, lemme know!

Oh yeah, MATLAB is painful. I get why you use it at first - it’s great for handling derivations for you when looking at control code, and handles matricies well enough when learning kinematics. But once my homeworks started to demand animations and complex processing I yearned for a language with classes or any advance features at all. Still, managed to make some cool stuff - like this RRT path planned transmission removal 😄

What startup (assuming you’re out of stealth mode?) Good luck with the jump over to a startup. It’s rough but hopefully you knock it out of the park.

As for code deploy - I’ve worked on the problem at two startups now. I can probably advise you on some stuff to look into, but would need to know more about the problem space you’re specifically looking at. Though I’m hesitant to mention full obfuscation if you’re not delivering a finished product but rather a module to the end customer.

For the self driving car, are we talking about hobbyist size (ie Donkey car), add on tech (ie Comma OpenPilot) or full on autonomous vehicle? Sounds really cool.

Upgrading from an old tech stack to a newer one is always a pain, especially in Python - one of the reasons I hate that it’s so widely adapted for deep learning, CV, and robotics.

Hopefully you’ll regale us with details, this sounds fascinating.

How’re you liking the ID4? That and the ioniq5 are looking pretty good ATM… Though I wish the Honda E or ID3 was sold in the US…