Chapter 1: Why do 80% of US manufacturing facilities lack automation?
In the U.S., something like 80% of manufacturing facilities, if you just count them, have no automation at all. The hardware is willing and the software is weak. I've got this hammer, which is a robot, and I'd like to make it the best hammer ever. That's not the same as knowing what to hit with it.
Somebody who doesn't even come from a robotics background, ideally, I think they generally have the best ideas. I think robotics and AI today are going to be and will continue to be genuinely disruptive. Like, there's a little bit of hubris in imagining that, like, this is the one time that it will be different versus all the other technologies.
The folks at NASA Ames did is they built a, what's called the Astra B. It's a cube-shaped robot that's like 18 inches on a side. And it's, they've got, I think, three of them inside the International Space Station. They got fans on each side and they free fly around inside the space station.
Chapter 2: What is the significance of the Robot Operating System (ROS)?
They could look over the astronaut's shoulder and give ground mission control a, like a over-the-shoulder view. And that runs the, that runs Ross. Knowing that there's some code that we wrote that's up there is just extraordinary.
Hello, and welcome humans to the Neuron AI Explained. I am your host, Grant Harvey. And today we're talking about a part of the AI race that gets a lot less attention than chatbots, but may end up mattering even more. That's robotics.
Our guest today is Brian Gerke, CTO of Intrinsic, the robotic software company that began inside Alphabet and now sits inside Google, working closely with DeepMind and Gemini. So today we're getting into physical AI, why robotics suddenly feels like it's accelerating, what Intrinsic is building, and... whether this could be the Android layer for robotics.
Chapter 3: How does Intrinsic aim to be the 'Android of robotics'?
So Brian, welcome to The Neuron. Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here. Brian, yeah, it's great to have you. Could you tell us a little bit about your background, how you became CTO of Intrinsic, and what Intrinsic does for people who don't know?
Sure. So I'll just give you a brief background on me because it's worth wondering, like, how do you get into robotics? So for me, that journey started when I was an undergrad. I was studying computer engineering and a professor named Jim Jennings came into the department and he started a robot lab.
Chapter 4: What challenges exist in simulating physical contact for robotics?
And I remember walking past that room and looking inside and seeing these, what we affectionately called trash can robots at the time, because they were kind of shaped like cylindrical trash cans, but mobile robots that were moving around and people were writing code and making them move around. I saw that and I thought, that's pretty cool.
I volunteered, started working in the lab, and that just hooked me. The idea that you could write code and then make something physical happen in the world, that was just so compelling. And then I stuck with it, went through grad school, stuck with robotics, and did... a series of things. But for me, what I discovered along the way is I'm really a tool builder.
So I think of myself as someone who is providing people with the tools, especially the software tools that they need to program robots, whether they're programming robots for in a lab because they're doing science because they're like in a grad program or they're students who are learning robotics, which by the way, is now increasingly happening at like a high school and a middle school level, like much before people get to college, which is a fantastic thing.
Or they're in industrial research or they're going after increasingly products, like they're doing product development. And so along the way, I spent a lot of my time building robot software platforms, let's say.
Chapter 5: How is AI revolutionizing perception in robotics?
And a lot of that work has been open source. So my team and I built an open source platform called ROS, which is pretty widely used throughout the robotics ecosystem. in a bunch of different applications. We had a commercial side of that company that was acquired by Intrinsic now a little over three years ago. And that's how I came into Intrinsic. Awesome. Very cool.
I guess what I would love to follow up on is when you are building tools for
robotics is that the same as you would build like a software like like program for any other type of software that you would create or is there something specific that you have to do to make it like actually work with the robot like with robots in the real world like that physical layer you're talking about yeah it's a great question that's one that in robotics we tend to take we take for granted that the answer is yes it's different and that it is in part because we think that we're special snowflakes and everything that we do requires special attention and we need special versions of everything not all of which is entirely true
But there is a real difference in when you're writing software that is interacting with the physical world versus writing software that is interacting with, say, a network or a database or a display.
Chapter 6: What role do humans play in the future of robotics?
So that physical interaction means that you're bringing in sensor data. So you're writing a robot application. It means your inputs are ultimately they become binary, right? Ones and zeros. But the... dimensionality is very large. So you're, and they vary over time.
You're reading from sensors, which might be cameras, they might be lasers, they might be inertial measurement units that tell you how you're flying around in the world and interpreting that data and then deciding what to do and then trying to, and then your action is not only like, I'm going to compute an answer and then write it down or display it to a screen. The answer in a sense is like,
take action in the world.
Chapter 7: How can open-source tools drive innovation in robotics?
So you're perceiving this world in this rich way, trying to understand what's happening out there. And then the answer that you compute, instead of just being a number, it's a series of commands that you're sending to a robot and you're telling the motors what to do.
And you're telling them what to do with the understanding that they're not going to do exactly what you tell them to do, because there's always going to be some uncertainty in the
the in the action and so then you need to observe the world again close that loop and that it that kind of interaction with the physical world it's a pretty challenging problem so that's part of it is just dealing with that physical interaction another part that i think warrants special attention for robotics is that it is so interdisciplinary as a field so
If you want to build a robot, first of all, you need people who have the mechanical skills, which is totally not me. I'm a software person. I'm a computer scientist by training. But you need the people who can build the physical body of the robot. And then even once you've got that and you want to build the software on top of it, you need people who are experts at the underlying infrastructure.
You need people who are experts at interacting with databases.
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Chapter 8: What future applications might robotics have beyond manufacturing?
You need people who are experts at building human machine interfaces because you're going to have a human actually interacting with this thing. You need people who are experts in perception, in motion planning, in real-time control, in grasp planning. And you need to provide a software platform that lets all those people collaborate together.
And frankly, that part of it, giving people the right tools so that they can focus on their specialty and then come up with a result and contribute it in a way that it plugs into a larger system without binding everybody up into trying to all work on the same code at the same time. It's actually kind of tricky.
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.
That sounds like one of the most difficult software engineering challenges I can imagine. Trying to deal with all of that sensor data and all of the different people who have to collaborate to make it work. I mean, you're basically reverse engineering. I mean, I know you don't do humanoid robots that intrinsic, right?
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.
But your reverse engineering, you know, a layer of intelligence that can operate in the physical world, it's hard for me to fathom as someone who's never built with that stuff before. So I'm just like, how do you keep all the data?
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
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