Brian Gerkey

And that's why you see in a lot of robot software platforms, there tends to be a real decentralized approach.

So you end up building it as kind of a distributed system where you have these different components each doing their own job, and then they're tied together to produce the behavior that you want.

Or do you?

We at Intrinsic, we're primarily working with robot arms and also some mobile robots.

But, you know, you bring arms and mobility together and, you know, you've got mobile manipulation.

One form of that could be humanoids.

It's not a focus for us right now, but, you know, who knows what the future holds.

And how do you understand it, right?

So that's another, you look at like a really good robot software platform is going to give you really good visualization and debugging tools.

I mean, you know.

You think about like if you're doing, let's say, web app development today in your browser, you've got this amazing suite of tools that allow you to introspect what's happening.

You can see like where the data is flowing.

You can basically debug the system, which is great.

And what robotics developers need are those same tools, but they also need to be able to take in this data.

highly variable data i need to be able to see the a camera image overlaid with a 3d point cloud from a laser scanner overlay and then i want that in the reference frame of the drone as it is flying overhead and observing a scene like having those sorts of tools and i need to be able to log all that data and then i need to be able to play it back and then run it through the one part of the system that i'm debugging so that the developer tool side of it is also pretty demanding

Absolutely.

So when I, the ROS that I referred to before, that's actually an open source project that got its start in the late 2000s when I was working with some fantastic folks at a robotics company called Will Garage.

We were working on a mobile, actually also a mobile manipulation platform.

You could...

You could even think of it almost like an early humanoid.