Robert Playter

And so even getting to the point where it was the same code going from one to the other,

We probably didn't really get that working until, you know, a few years, several years ago.

But that was a, you know, that was a bit of a milestone.

And so you want to work, certainly work these pipelines so that you can make it as easy as possible and have a bunch of people working in parallel, especially when you, you know, we only have, you know, four of the Atlas robots, the modern Atlas robots at the company.

And, you know, we probably have, you know, 40 developers there all trying to gain access to it.

And so you need to,

share resources and use some of the software pipeline.

The root of some of our physics-based simulation tools really started at MIT, and we built some good physics-based modeling tools there.

The early days of the company, we were trying to develop those tools as a commercial product.

So we continued to develop them.

It wasn't a particularly successful commercial product, but we ended up with some nice physics-based simulation tools so that when we started doing legged robotics again, we had a really nice tool to work with.

And the things we paid attention to were things that weren't necessarily handled very well in the commercial tools you could buy off the shelf, like interaction with the world, like foot ground contact.

So trying to model those contact events well in a way that captured the important parts of the interaction was

was a really important element to get right and to also do in a way that was computationally feasible and could run fast.

Because if your simulation runs too slow, then your developers are sitting around waiting for stuff to run and compile.

So it's always about efficient, fast operation as well.

So that's been a big part of it.

You know, I think developing those tools in parallel to the development of the platform and trying to scale them has really been essential, I'd say, to us being able to assemble a team of people that could do this.

Yeah.

So it will be even more complex with manipulation because there's a lot more going on, you know, and you need to capture, I don't know, things slipping and moving, you know, in your hand.