20 years of Robotics

What Changed, what didn't,

what the future holds

What is this all about?

• How robotic changed in the recent years.

• Why robotic software is written the way it is.

• Effective Design Patterns in robotics.

Who am I ?

• A passionate roboticist.

• A senior software developer.

• Project Manager, Business Developer, Mechanical Engineer, Startup Founder, Geek, etc...

A younger and thinner version of me (on the right side)

A weird email...

Dude, it is 2018, where is my  robot?

Robotics is hard

• Requires complex Domain Specific knowledge.
• Close to the hardware. A lot of work is was required on the driver side.
• Difficult to model uncertainty and real-world environments.
• Depends on scientific progresses in other domains.

• Non trivial problem requires concurrency and parallelism.
• You never have enough CPU.
• Robotic engineers are bad Software engineers.

 all the way down...

 Its

2005:

Robotic Software Frameworks everywhere

Orocos

Marie

Miro

Opros

Aseba

All these middlewares had many things in common

Component Based Software Engineering

Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is a branch of software engineering that emphasizes the separation of concerns with respect to the wide-ranging functionality available throughout a given software system.

It is a reuse-based approach to defining, implementing and composing loosely coupled independent components into systems.

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In robotics we want:

• To distribute data to multiple clients.
• Often, we don't need synchronous communication.
• Robustness against unreliable data producers.
• Freedom to use multiple computational nodes.

2008: and then ROS came...

ROS was bound to win the "middlewares war"

Technically speaking:

• Easy to learn
• No-bullshits API
• Many Tools
• Many Drivers
• Easy to install
• Well documented
• C++ Package management

ROS was bound to win the "middlewares war"

They had:

• Many talented people
• Multi-years effort
• Smart marketing
• Uncompromising Vision
• Community building
• Focused on real-world
• in other words: "Lot of meny"

• It accelerated 3x-5X the development of robotic systems.
• It became the "standard" that we desperately needed (the winner takes it all).
• Open Source

The good:

The bad:

• ROS is a just a (very good) tool,  but people rely too much on it.
• Resource hungry in some cases.
• Thrown away many important lesson from CBSE.
• Open Source.

Biggest challenges in robotics (until 2014)

• It is a small market (*)
• Small investments and little capital
• Depends on innovation in other fields
• Technology is not mature
• Hard to industrialize

2014 - today

• It is a small market
• Small investments and little capital
• Depends on innovation in other fields (Autonomous cars?)
• Technology is not mature (?)
• Hard to industrialize

The most important bottleneck:

Computer Vision and Perception

Robotic Perception. How hard could it be?

Computer Vision... is hard!

"This AI and Machine Learning stuff is useless"

The A.I. Winter

ImageNET 2012: everything changes...

Since 2012, the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time.

By comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period.

Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x

This is just just the beginning:

• A.I. will evolve more and more, in a non linear way.
• Robotics will be able to solve more Business Cases and Use Cases.
• Riding the hype wave, many startups will be created.
• More Fundamental Research is needed.
• More Applied Research, too.
• Nevertheless, serial production of complex robots is still hard.

Thank you for

your attentionn