I’ve decided this is the right time to go back to entrepreneurship. We're at an incredible moment for embodied intelligence, but I feel the tools and workflows we use to interact, monitor, and control these platforms are still lagging behind.
I'm currently exploring a couple of projects around how we build, test, and interact with robots. As part of my customer discovery phase, I'm trying to gather raw data on how roboticists and developers actually work day to day and what their main pain points are regarding control interfaces.
I put together a very short survey (3 mins) to validate some ideas. If you work in robotics, embedded systems, or just tinker with hardware, your input would be incredibly valuable:
Survey link: https://forms.gle/3Nm76wkeT5CMt23c8
I'm also open to discussing the ethical lines in modern robotics or anything related to ROS2 / HRI in the thread. Thanks for reading!
I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?
I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.
I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?
(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)
Helping people enhance is a good thing!
I knew about BD's history with DARPA, of course. The issue was that my company was doing some actually really interesting non-defense work, and then decided to pivot and mount teleoperated weapons on these platforms for a new demo. That’s when I submitted my resignation :)
Human emotions and reasoning could be internally inconsistent and conflicting, yet everything is as it should be, counter-intuitively.
But as expected, others have taken their place [2]. Guilt-tripping a single non-monopoly proving useless again.
[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/news/general-purpose-robots-shoul...
[2]: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260323PD219/military-bosto...
That’s just marketing bs in the same vein as “Your privacy is very important to us.”. It means nothing.
He said he worked with their hardware, not that he worked for Boston Dynamics.
Entirely possible to be working with a platform provided by Boston Dynamics at a company that is not engaged in weapons development.
With robotics and AI, it feels like there are a lot of directions it could go that would lead to higher quality of life and not just temporary advantages for killing other people.
Using a survey like this is IMO not ideal though.
I hope you are able to convince some of your colleagues to do likewise.
Won't be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of humanoid robots strapped up with explosives running to their target or some of them flying to their target with drones attached.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU
Cakes exist and I even like them, and I do not choose to work at a bakery.
All the drone warfare developments remind me of the introduction of tanks during the first world war and perfected by the second world war. In the space of a few years they changed warfare. Then planes changed warfare again. Now drones. Makes you wonder what the next thing will be
Which of course leads to point 2: it's very easy to take a moral stance on weapons when you don't think you're in any danger, nor going to be doing any of the fighting otherwise.
Rather than blowing up a school full of little girls, you could deploy a swarm of thousands of fast-moving cat-sized robots armed with tasers and bolas to identify and capture targeted enemy leaders.
There are many open source solutions out there: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-forms/?license=ope... I recommend if you can choose any of privacy friendly options, thanks and have a nice day.
I’d be wary of a founder with such bad NIH
Web forms are simple like that slack notification thing is simple.
Write a form in .md (even tell an llm to do it) and just put it online.
Unfortunately it doesn't matter, some else will go ... just look at the ukr war.