
Robot maker’s fortune built on a simple idea - imgabe
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25518218/
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ivankirigin
People here might like to know that the Roomba is successful as a consumer
product because the parts are so cheap. They are so cheap because they can fit
a great deal of intelligence in a tiny kernel. They do this with a toy version
of Lisp. By toy, I literally mean designed for toys. "My real baby".

It's actually a software problem -- and the numerous clones failed to figure
that out.

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jsrn
IIRC, you worked at iRobot before starting TipJoy. Would you mind to share
your opinion how you see the future of the company (medium to long term)?

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ivankirigin
My stock options are junk right now. It doesn't make sense though because they
are pretty much the strongest mobile robot company in the world.

So medium term I wouldn't expect to make money off of IRBT. Long term, they
should be positioned to take advantage of both the high and low end robotics
markets. They aren't moving fast enough in certain areas -- and if Tipjoy does
well, I'll take advantage of that.

The most interesting tech is definitely on the high end. The trend towards
thousands of cores in a processor actually works really well with the kind of
sensor processing and planning common in robotics. Particle filtering and
large matrix/image operations can often be significantly parallelized. They're
building a framework called Aware that is lots of C++ & Python to take
advantage of such architectures. <http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=32>

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ivankirigin
Ohh, and if you want to work for a robot company, but you're worried that you
don't know enough about robotics: apply right now. You don't need to know
robotics. Robotics is just a collection of different fields, with individuals
doing their specialties. You should most especially apply if you know Lisp,
because the Home Robots side needs you. <http://irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=79>

Ohh, I hear Anybots is hiring too, as is Willow Garage

<http://anybots.com/join.html>

<http://www.willowgarage.com/Careers>

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j2d2
Can you suggest some resources for playing with lisp in a robotics context?

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ivankirigin
The easiest by far would be to make or find a simulator. Dealing with a real
robot is a pain in the ass. Gazebo is a good robot simulator -- part of this
tookkit: <http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/gazebo/gazebo.html>

It's free and good. I'm sure someone has made some hooks into it. Building
those hooks would be a subset of building your own simulator.

