Brian Gerkey

Looked a little bit like Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons, if you squint.

So, but having said that, like we built it for that, for use in research, but now today that because it's open source, that platform is used by people across like every application that you can imagine.

So you've got people running off on not just robots, who else, but robots with legs and also robots that fly and also robots that float on the surface of the ocean or dive underneath it to understand what's happening from an ocean science perspective.

You've got robots doing like campus security.

You've got robots doing food delivery.

You've got robots doing autonomous driving on the road.

Like basically every application you can imagine, most of which we did not have in mind when we built the platform.

And that to me is just amazing.

That's one of the reasons that I personally identify as a tool builder because...

If you put the right tools out there, and especially if you provide them in a way where people are free to do as they like, where open source is one very permissive model for doing that, not the only way, but it's a very good way to do it, then you don't know what will come and you get to be surprised by it.

It's a super important question.

I think that the, you know, first of all, I don't, I think, you know, we talk about autonomous robots.

Autonomy is probably not exactly the right term because autonomy, it implies like, it implies intent and desire and, you know, things that we create don't have autonomy.

intent or desire they have they have some kind of capability to to perform tasks they don't necessarily desire to do anything so i think that the what that means is that they are always going to be working with and for people we're the ones who give any system that we build whether it's a you know at home it's a it's a washing machine it's a laundry machine that i say you know i give it intent by saying go

I have a robot in a factory.

I give it intent by telling it what I want it to do.

There are going to be humans interacting with these systems.

So thinking about how the humans interact with those systems over time, that's going to be...

The need for that is only increased as we see more applications.

Like sometimes people think about having, like introducing robots means we take the people away.