Brian Gerkey – Robohub

Apple, Amazon and now Google: It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics!

Frank Tobe — Sat, 14 Dec 2013 13:15:00 +0000

There is serious momentum in robotics these days, evidenced by recent news from Apple, Amazon and Google:

Apple announced that they were investing $10.5 billion in supply chain robots and automation equipment and recently confirmed their acquisition of PrimeSense for $350 million (PrimeSense is the developer of the Kinnect 3D system used by MS Xbox)..
Amazon, in a CBS 60 Minutes piece aired last Sunday, displayed a new concept delivery system using an octocopter. Remember that in 2012 Amazon spent $750 million to acquire Kiva Systems, the robot technology enabling robotically-delivered goods to a picker/packer.
And now Google has set up a robotics division headed by the man behind the Android operating system, Andy Rubin. In Rubin’s first six months he has acquired seven robotic companies to jump start his new operation.
UPDATE 12-14-13: Google confirms its eighth acquisition: Boston Dynamics. The new acquisition is an engineering company that specializes in building dynamic robots and software for human simulation. The acquisition adds 80+ technicians, engineers and scientists to the new Google Robots Division talent pool – plus a new location.

What does it all mean?

First, some details.

Andy Rubin and Meka robot.

From a NY Times article by John Markoff interviewing Google’s Andy Rubin:
- Google acquired 7 tech companies in the last 6 months. Schaft, a Japanese start-up developing a humanoid robot; Industrial Perception, a Silicon Valley start-up that developed a computer vision system for loading and unloading trucks; Meka Robotics, a robot developer for academia; Redwood Robotics, a start-up intended to compete with the Baxter robot (and others) entering the small and medium-sized shop and factory marketplace; Bot & Dolly, a maker of robotic camera systems used for special effects such as in the movie “Gravity;” Autofuss, a design and marketing firm and a partner in Bot & Dolly; and Holomni, a maker of powered caster modules for omnidirectional vehicles.
- Although Google won’t disclose their plans, the article suggests that the company’s initial market will be in manufacturing, e.g., electronics assembly, which is mostly done by hand. “Manufacturing and logistics markets not being served by today’s robotic technologies are clear opportunity markets,” said Rubin.
- The article suggests that the new Google robots will be able to automate any or all of the processes from the supply chain to the distribution channels to the consumer’s front door thereby creating a massive opportunity.
- Google is already experimenting with urban deliveries including making home deliveries for companies like Target, Walgreens and others.
- According to Markoff, “Mr. Rubin said he had pondered the possibility of a commercial effort in robotics for more than a decade. He has only recently come to think that a range of technologies have matured to the point where new kinds of automated systems can be commercialized.”
From The SFGate Tech Chronicles by James Temple:
- Google is transforming itself in many ways including its new robotics division. Its constantly transforming its search engine into a sophisticated learning machine using artificial intelligence tools. Some of that AI talent is moving over to the new Robotics Division.
- It’s been hiring super brains such as Ray Kurzweil and Peter Norvig and inhouse star Andy Rubin to head groups and divisions moving toward product development and even hardware manufacturing (remember that Google owns Motorola – a ready-made client for assembly and materials handling robots).
- “Google’s move into robotics is likely to draw renewed attention and money into the space,” said Brian Gerkey in the article. “It’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when someone like Google makes an investment like that in robots, others are likely to follow suit. It can only spur investment and innovation.”
From Bloomberg News by Adam Satariano:
- Apple is investing $10.5 billion in new technologies and robotics to polish the new iPhone 5C’s colored plastic cover, to laser and CNC machines to carve the MacBook’s aluminum body, and for testing and inspection gear for iPhone and iPad lenses.
- Apple invested $6.5 billion on similar robotics and factory automation equipment in their previous fiscal year.
- Samsung has indicated it plans to spend $22 billion in capital expenditures this year but didn’t disclose any further details.
For a review of the CBS 60 Minutes interview of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Charlie Rose, see my previous post, “Jeff Bezos Reaches for Tip of UAS Iceberg.”
UPDATE 12-14-13: From a NY Times article by John Markoff about the Boston Dynamics acquisition:

Markoff says: “The deal is also the clearest indication yet that Google is intent on building a new class of autonomous systems that might do anything from warehouse work to package delivery and even elder care.”
Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spin-off from MIT, has been a great resource for youTube videos of wild robots. Their Big Dog video has been watched by more than 15 million viewers; their ATLAS robot video, the base robot given to the DARPA Robotics Challenge teams – a challenge to speed development of robotics technology for disaster response – has already passed the 2.5 million mark.
This is not an insignificant acquisiton. An ongoing business employing 80+ highly paid engineers and scientists has to have cost Google a very high amount, perhaps in the low 9 figures.
Boston Dynamic’s CEO and founder Marc Raibert was quoted in the article: “I am excited by Andy and Google’s ability to think very, very big, with the resources to make it happen.”

What does all this mean?

I think the yellow highlighted quote from Brian Gerkey sums up all these investments nicely: it’s a pretty exciting day for robotics when Google, Apple and Amazon ALL invest in robots and robotics. Others are likely to follow spurring further investment and innovation. Up until now, the big four of industrial robotics (KUKA, Fanuc, ABB and Yaskawa Motoman) were all foreign firms while two smaller American firms (iRobot and Intuitive Surgical) led the emerging service new-tech robotics sector. The remainder of this decade will be filled with amazing new robotics products from a variety of new providers — including Apple, Amazon and Google.

Is open source a good business model for robotics?

RBI Editors — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 19:47:47 +0000

Open source vs. proprietary software is an age old question. Since the advent of robotics, we also have the question of open source hardware.

In academia, where robotics researchers look to open source as a means of advancing community knowledge, the answer is perhaps more obvious. But in business, it’s clearly a balancing act. And so, ‘To be open, or not to be open?’ — that is the question for our panelists this month.

We asked Frank Tobe, Robert Morris and Brian Gerkey to weigh in. Here’s what they have to say …

Brian Gerkey on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

The IT economy has powerfully demonstrated what happens when companies can leverage open source infrastructure when they build new products and services. A company like Google would never have come into existence had they not been able to rely from the beginning on solid open source tools like Python and GCC. IBM would arguably have not been able to make its immensely successful pivot from products to services without Linux. How many startups these days begin as a cloud-hosted machine running some derivative of the venerable LAMP stack? …

Robert Morris on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

The premise of this question is that robotics companies are manufacturers and that there is choice between an open source and closed source business model. Robotics companies are best thought of as service companies (even manufacturers, especially when moving beyond early adopters) and openness is not an ‘either/or’ choice, but rather a continuum. In this day and age the question is, ‘What do you need to keep open create value for your customers?’ …

Frank Tobe on “Is open source a good business model for robotics?”

Certainly robotics has its share of proprietary software and control systems. Each robot manufacturer markets their products based on the need for secure, proprietary and un-shared systems so that they can ensure stability and control. Whole industries have been set up to bridge those proprietary barriers so that multi-vendor solutions can happen …

DARPA’s Virtual Robotics Challenge a practical step forward on the long road toward disaster-response capable humanoids

Hallie Siegel — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:47:16 +0000

Based on a media rountable discussion with DRC Program Manager Gill Pratt and CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation Brian Gerkey.

The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear disaster was a wake-up call to the robotics community. In Japan, many asked why a country known for its cutting-edge robotics sector was unable to respond to the emergency. Worldwide, robotics experts pointed to the event as a real-world test of what robots can and cannot do.

Whether man-made or natural — or like Fukushima, a combination of the two — major catastrophic events, while rare, are becoming increasingly costly as human populations worldwide move to urban areas. This is why, in an effort to spur the development of agile humanoid first-responders, the US Department of Defense’s strategic plan identifies disaster response as a priority area, and why it is funnelling tens of millions of dollars into the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

DRC Program Manager Dr. Gill Pratt envisions a future where tele-operated robots can be quickly deployed by disaster-response personnel with minimal robotics training: “In Fukushima, during the first 24 hours, the explosions would not have occurred if it would have been possible to vent the reactors,” said Pratt in a media round-table last month. “Human beings tried to do this but had to turn around [because of the radiation]. Our hope is to develop machines that can actually intervene and help make a disaster [like this one] less severe.” Estimates of the total economic loss due to the Fukushima disaster range from $250B – $500B US.

Concept drawing for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.

Why a humanoid?
Though having a robot that can safely navigate dangerous places like the inside of a nuclear plant is no-doubt useful, one has to question whether the extreme cost and design challenge of developing a humanoid that is capable of doing so is worth the effort. Yet as Pratt points out, a disaster scenario that is catastrophic to humans is also most likely to occur in an environment that has been engineered for humans, and what kind of robot would be more capable of navigating in a human environment and using the tools found there than a humanoid?

As DARPA project leaders were designing parameters for the Robotics Challenge, they consulted with first-response experts — including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and identified key capability requirements that indeed seem to point to a humanoid solution: the ability to go through doors, climb steep stairs, walk on rough terrain, and the ability to use whatever tools are oh hand, such as a utility vehicle or a screw driver.

“Our belief is that we will never know where the next disaster is going to hit and when it will be, and so we have to be prepared to use whatever tools are on hand,” said Pratt. “And at least for the foreseeable future, those are tools for people to use, and so we need to adapt our machines to use those tools as quickly as possible.”

How does one gauge success when the potential payoff may be decades or more away?

Designing a roadmap for success
DARPA does not define the success of its programs through a profit and loss model, and its goal with the DARPA Robotics Challenge is not to bring a humanoid first-responder to every fire station in the country. As a government agency, DARPA focuses on bringing high-risk technologies to the point of prototype, and then handing these off to the military or commercial sector for development. It invests in challenges such as the DRC in order to spur radical innovation, and short-term technical failure is OK as long as the long-term potential payoff is high.

But despite these lofty goals, the question remains: what’s the roadmap for designing and overseeing a major robotics challenge such as this one? How does one gauge success when the potential payoff may be decades or more away?

DARPA’s previous autonomous car challenges offer some lessons, and one of them is that there isn’t always a winner. Pratt admits that success for the DRC isn’t guaranteed, but says that the goal of the competition isn’t so much to declare a winner as it is to continually nudge the competitors towards greater achievements, while at the same time being realistic about what is actually doable. As a result, DARPA will be reevaluating the project’s milestones and adjusting the difficulty of the tasks in consultation with the participants along the way.

Previous autonomous car competitions are different from the current challenge in one major aspect, however: the older competitions were based on automotive technology, which already had a significant infrastructure in place. The robotics industry, by comparison, is still in its infancy, and so a great many hurdles exist for competitors, both at the software level and at the hardware level, and in terms of integration. Pratt has thus broken the competition down into three stages and four separate competitor tracks in an attempt to structure what is otherwise an extremely open-ended problem. (You can find a good explanation of how the competition breaks down on DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet.)

The first stage of the DRC — the Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC) — offers particular insight into DARPA’s strategy for success. The VRC, for which the results were announced earlier this month, was a cloud-based competition designed to test software, and its goal was to evaluate the teams’ robot perception, manipulation and locomotion in a virtual environment as a first step before moving on to the physical trials, which will take place in December of 2013. The big idea here is that teams will be able to try out their strategies in simulation first, before investing in hardware. “The reason we had this virtual challenge is that we wanted to open the contest to teams whose strength is primarily software,” said Pratt.

DARPA’s simulator models real-world physics and behaviours with incredibly high accuracy. Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSFR), the organization behind the VRC simulator, says that their goal is for the simulation to be the best possible stand-in for the real robot, so that teams that have done well in the VRC should be able to run their software virtually unchanged on the physical robot during the trials. And yet run to such a complex simulation — and to play that simulation back at interactive rates — takes a huge amount of computer power.

Success for the DRC isn’t guaranteed, but the goal of the competition isn’t so much to declare a winner as it is to continually nudge the competitors towards greater achievements.

“One of the key developments over the past several years has been the advancement of cloud computing resources,” explained Gerkey. “It’s now possible to rent access to cloud computing resources so that you can have modest computer at your end and have the simulation run somewhere else. That’s a key aspect of this project and it’s really required in order to run the competition.”

The seven winning teams from the VRC challenge each received an Atlas furnished by Boston Dynamics for use in the DRC trials, where they will compete with other funded and unfunded teams that have been developing their own hardware (see DARPA’s Meet the Teams video to get a sense of what Atlas will be up against). They now have until late December to transfer their software algorithms to the Atlas hardware shell, and practice running a real machine in real environment. The physical trials should be a good demonstrator of the success of the simulator approach to competition design.

Building a legacy
DARPA takes a long view to technology development, starting with identifying a major national security need (in this case: disaster response), then determining the specific technologies and innovations needed to address that need (in this case: easily deployed agile humanoid robots), and finally working to support the fundamental breakthroughs required to make these technologies possible. DARPA’s disaster challenge is thus about creating infrastructure to support long-term software and hardware development in the robotics community; it’s also about attracting bright minds to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

One of the legacies of the VRC is that all the software code for the simulator is being distributed open source, and so, as Gerkey points out, there is no cost to reuse it later.

“The history of software development has shown that this is the best possible, most efficient development model for building the common platform that a whole community comes to rely upon,” says Gerkey. “The simulation work that we’re doing is really part of a broader effort to build a common ecosystem of software tools and libraries that everyone can use. There are computers that are powerful enough to run this simulation that you can rent for on the order of a couple of dollars an hour.”

The hope is that, ultimately, the open-source VRC simulator will help speed up the development of robots in general by lowering the barrier of entry and that this, in turn, will lead to more capable robots – perhaps ones capable enough to be of service in a Fukushima-like disaster. Says Gerkey: “Once we can run this very realistic simulation in a competition, we can then try this in a classroom scenario. You don’t have to outfit your classroom with expensive powerful computers.”

Pratt agrees: “Right now we have a few really talented designers and a few companies that are beginning to be strong in the robotics field. We would like to see those numbers go way up, and we believe that the way to do it is to give people a tool to develop these machines without having to incur the cost of first building them.”

What are the economics, and how much are we willing to invest in preparing ourselves for rare but very costly events? That’s a national debate and decision that we need to make … It’s going to depend on that discussion much more than the technology — our role is to bring that technology to the point where that discussion is possible to have.– Gill Pratt, DARPA

Fostering international cooperation
Fukushima is used as an example to motivate the need for robotic platforms in dangerous environments, and the VRC is being promoted as an internationally beneficial endeavour, so I asked Pratt what specifically is being done to foster international cooperation, and whether there was a possibility that DARPA would work with other countries on future challenges.

Pratt answered that a key measure for success in this project is engagement with the international community. “All the code that we’re writing is distributed under the Apache 2 licence which is a very permissive open source license that allows anyone in the world to do anything that they want with this software. We would love for the challenge (once we are done with it in the next year and a half) to move around the world, and we have been in discussions with our counterparts in Japan and the EU about the possibility of this becoming a rotating contest. We think that [making societies more resilient to disasters] is a need that the whole world has, and so and I’m spending quite a lot of my time having lots of discussions about what the future of this is going to be once we are done … I personally think that the international part of this is a key way to measure how well we have done, so if we’re successful in having the DRC continue on somewhere else in the world, then it will be clear that we have done well.”

Though Pratt hesitates to predict how long it will be before we have robots capable of helping out in situations such as the one in Fukushima, he is convinced that DARPA’s Robotic Challenge will result in some major developments for the field:

“I think that at the end of the DRC in December 2014, we’re going to see a demonstration that will be very evocative, and that will make clear that robots could eventually have these kinds of capabilities. The only question then is, what are the economics, and how much are we willing to invest in preparing ourselves for rare but very costly events? That’s a national debate and decision that we need to make … It’s going to depend on that discussion much more than the technology — our role is to bring that technology to the point where that discussion is possible to have.”

***

More info:

DARPA Robotics Challenge Website
DARPA Robotics Challenge Fact Sheet

Look out for DRC trial coverage in December!

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

Brian Gerkey — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:46:18 +0000

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.

What is the single biggest obstacle preventing robotics from going mainstream?

RBI Editors — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:01:32 +0000

It has been said that we are on the edge of a ‘robotic tipping point’ … but where, exactly, is this edge? And what’s holding us back? This month we asked our panelists to weigh in on what’s keeping robots from going mainstream. Here’s what they have to say …

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

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 …

Mark Tilden on “What is the single biggest obstacle preventing robotics from going mainstream?”

From experience, the single biggest obstacle to personal robotic markets is cost, both in money and time. Robots have the disadvantage of being over-promoted in fictional media while over-priced on the shelves. Sci-fi is fine to inspire if builders feel the money-time is justified, but …

Alan Winfield on “What is the single biggest obstacle preventing robotics from going mainstream?”

Well it depends on what you mean by mainstream. For a number of major industry sectors robotics is already mainstream. In assembly-line automation, for instance; or undersea oil well maintenance and inspection …

ROSCon 2012: Keynote (part 1 of 2)

John Payne — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:38:24 +0000

ROSCon 2012 Keynote, by Morgan Quigley, with introduction by Brian Gerkey, Part 1 of 2.
(Duration 23:46) Post revised 08Aug2012.

Open source robotics foundation announced

John Payne — Thu, 17 May 2012 18:18:27 +0000

Announced via the Willow Garage website, the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. (OSRF) is an independent non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community. Its mission is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development. OSRF’s board of directors includes Professor Wolfram Burgard of the University of Freiburg, Ryan Gariepy, CTO of Clearpath Robotics, Brian Gerkey, Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage, Helen Greiner, a co-founder of iRobot and currently CEO of CyPhyWorks, and Sam Park, Executive Vice President of Yujin Robot. Initially sponsored projects include the Robot Operating System (ROS), and Gazebo, a 3D multi-robot simulator with dynamics. Gazebo has been chosen by DARPA as the simulation platform for its recently announced robotics challenge for (humanoid) disaster robots.