Robohub.org
 

Brian Gerkey on “What is the single biggest obstacle preventing robotics from going mainstream?”


by
15 May 2013



share this:

The biggest obstacle to broader adoption of robotics is that only experienced roboticists can develop robotics applications.  To make a robot reliably and robustly do something useful, you need a deep understanding of a broad variety of topics, from state estimation to perception to path planning.  While few people in the world have this expertise, many people can write software.  What we need is more of those software developers involved in the business of developing robotics applications.

I say “applications” to distinguish this work from that of developing new algorithms or core building blocks.  Making an analogy to traditional software development, I don’t need to understand how process schedulers, or file systems, or memory managers work in order to develop useful desktop applications.  And I don’t need to know the details of DNS, web servers, or web sockets to develop portable web applications.  Knowing more about the underpinnings of the system will always be useful, of course.  But the key is that, once the building blocks are established, understood, documented, and tutorialized, the barrier has been greatly lowered: you just need to be able to write code.

Beyond just getting more people working with robots, we need better ideas for how robotics technology can be usefully and profitably employed to support people in their everyday lives.  My experience in the robotics community over the last 15 years has convinced me that roboticists are pathologically bad at coming up with application ideas.  We’re enamored of the technology, which is good in that it motivates us to work hard on important problems.  But it also leads us to concentrate on “robotic” solutions to problems, without regard to what people who experience those problems really need.  We can fix this problem by adding orders of magnitude more developers to our community, each of whom comes with a new and different perspective. And we can do that by making the development of robotics applications accessible to any competent programmer.

The Android and iOS platforms made it possible for people with no more than a passing understanding of 3G, GPS, or touch screens to build useful, even world-changing mobile applications.  We can do the same for robotics.  We’re on the right path, with a lot of effort going into open, shared software platforms for robotics.  We just need to keep pushing, and to keep the non-robotics engineer in mind when we’re building things.

Read more answers →



tags: ,


Brian Gerkey is CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).
Brian Gerkey is CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF).





Related posts :



Robot Talk Episode 123 – Standardising robot programming, with Nick Thompson

  30 May 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Nick Thompson from BOW about software that makes robots easier to program.

Congratulations to the #AAMAS2025 best paper, best demo, and distinguished dissertation award winners

  29 May 2025
Find out who won the awards presented at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems last week.

Congratulations to the #ICRA2025 best paper award winners

  27 May 2025
The winners and finalists in the different categories have been announced.

#ICRA2025 social media round-up

  23 May 2025
Find out what the participants got up to at the International Conference on Robotics & Automation.

Robot Talk Episode 122 – Bio-inspired flying robots, with Jane Pauline Ramos Ramirez

  23 May 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Jane Pauline Ramos Ramirez from Delft University of Technology about drones that can move on land and in the air.

Robot Talk Episode 121 – Adaptable robots for the home, with Lerrel Pinto

  16 May 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Lerrel Pinto from New York University about using machine learning to train robots to adapt to new environments.

What’s coming up at #ICRA2025?

  16 May 2025
Find out what's in store at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, which will take place from 19-23 May.

Robot see, robot do: System learns after watching how-tos

  14 May 2025
Researchers have developed a new robotic framework that allows robots to learn tasks by watching a how-to video



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence