
Investing in Robotics with YC Founder Trevor Blackwell [video] - tlb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdxQ_tSBjMY
======
rexreed
There have been so many problems with investing in Robotics. The collapse of
Rethink Robotics (led by none other than Rodney Brooks) and Jibo and Anki as
well as many others leaves one wondering about long-term investor commitment
to robotics.

Listen to this podcast on the subject of challenging investing climate in
robotics: [https://www.cognilytica.com/2020/07/08/ai-today-podcast-
what...](https://www.cognilytica.com/2020/07/08/ai-today-podcast-whats-
happening-with-robotics/)

Just an alternate non-hypey, non-rosey, non-theoretical, non-SV perspective on
what is actually happening in the robotics industry.

~~~
Animats
_There have been so many problems with investing in Robotics._

Robots usually replace minimum wage people. In countries with a big
underclass, they're not cost effective.

Robotic milkers, are big in New Zealand and Holland. In the US, the dairy
industry is whining for more visas for low-wage immigrant labor.[1]

[1] [https://www.dairybusiness.com/ag-labor-shortage-fix-
offered-...](https://www.dairybusiness.com/ag-labor-shortage-fix-offered-for-
dairy-industry/)

------
ivankirigin
This was a fun interview, thanks Trevor!

There are a few controverial bits that I'd love to hear what HN thinks.

1\. Boston Dynamics Spot, where you have a technical achievement without a
clear application

2\. What it takes to win in self driving. At one point Musk said "If you have
accurate vector space representation, then you're kind of like a video game."
That's just not true.

~~~
rozgo
2\. "you're kind of like a video game." I think this is a fair
characterization. It's obviously not a video game, but there is enormous
overlap, once you've successfully modeled your perception in vector space.

This is actually my entire strategy for approaching autonomy, I make as much
of the problem space a game; just a serious one. And the most successful
optimizations and solutions are the ones that adopt techniques from games.
Many academic solutions are formalizations for old-school game "hacks".

In my line of work, training, in many occasions, is about making deep computer
vision match ground truth, generated by game tech.

~~~
bumby
I actually think this is one area where people are conflating a perception
problem with a much more complex problem.

In many ways, “perception” is solved or close to it. But this is just a subset
of the self-driving problem

~~~
jacquesm
Perception is where it begins. Then you can start to _reason_. Case in point:
just the other day I drove past a line of cars. Right hand side passenger door
opens, so I slow down by lifting a bit and sure enough, less than a second
later the driver side door gets flung open. If not for reasoning then I would
not have lifted and likely would have hit either the door or the former driver
of the car when they got out. Those little hints that we humans are good at
processing (passenger disembarks: driver likely to follow) would be very hard
to teach a computer in such a way that it would not lead to false positives
all the time.

~~~
inventtheday
couldn't that specific correlation be learned with enough data?

~~~
DayDollar
Comp vis often reclassifys objects, loosing history.. You see them get in- you
know they are closing the doors. Comp vis sees a butterfly, and sees a car
with doors half open.

If you do not allow for frequent doubt, aka re-classification, you get
hallucinating systems, imagining a bike-rishka as a slow car with people
hanging out

~~~
bumby
There’s been some cases that highlight the danger of this as well as bad
examples of how mitigations were poorly implemented.

I believe a case of a pedestrian being killed by a self driving car was
related to the system reclassifying enough to initiate a deliberate delay
timer. In a system traveling 60mph this delay in decision was enough to cause
a mishap

~~~
Animats
Cite? The Uber killing was simply that the self-driving system was not allowed
to do an emergency stop. All it could do was alert the driver. Presumably
because they had a high false alarm rate.

The serious accidents involving self-driving cars have all been huge failures
at the basic "don't run into things" task. Google/Waymo, which seems to be
past that, has subtle problems, like "projected that bus couldn't fit through
space to left of car in wide lane and so turned slightly into path of bus and
was scraped." The standard Waymo accident is "advanced into intersection,
detected cross traffic, stopped, was rear-ended by human driver at low
speed".[1]

[1] [https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-
services/auto...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-
services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/)

~~~
bumby
“The self-driving car was fully autonomous at the time at the accident” [1]

It appears the mitigation for a high false positive (I.e., nuisance alarm) was
to program in a delay (I.e., “action suppression”) which inadvertently
introduced a worse hazard, the timetable from it is in the link below

[1][https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/06/uber_self_driving_c...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/06/uber_self_driving_car_death/)

[https://dms.ntsb.gov/public/62500-62999/62978/629713.pdf](https://dms.ntsb.gov/public/62500-62999/62978/629713.pdf)

------
Animats
Is there a transcript or summary? It's 49 minutes of talking heads, no robots.

~~~
contingencies
Memes in the video. Iterate quickly. Copies in China. Horizontal platform
plays are hard. Regulation sux. Public POC makes competitive landscape more
dangerous. Validation vs. investment for mass manufacturing / prototyping vs.
DfM. Value of robotics in food delivery.

Yet to see anyone else with a robotic startup conclude "iterate quickly" \+
"relaxed regulations" = move to China and own your own factory, production
hardware and know-how, operations and deployment, keeping R&D and POC in-
house, in the food distribution domain. This happens to be our exact strategy
and play.

~~~
marcell
Did you move there as a non-Chinese person? If yes, is that hard to do? Any
challenges you've faced?

~~~
contingencies
_Any challenges_

Hahah. Yes. Where to start...

~~~
marcell
Mainly, I'm surprised this was even allowed. My understanding is that if
you're not a Han Chinese, you cannot really do business in China, that you're
basically swimming against both cultural exclusion, and government exclusion.

~~~
contingencies
You can do business OK. Areas of difficulty include: highly dynamic
environment, heavy paperwork, sometimes opaque bureaucracy, really unfamiliar
banking system (particularly forex), many regulatory bureaus with seemingly
overlapping responsibilities, etc. However, the reality is once you are up and
running there is a tremendous degree of freedom, perhaps a more friendly
regulatory environment than in most western countries, 100% mobile payment
penetration, rapid supply chains for everything, simplified tax, single
timezone, etc. It's simultaneously scary and awesome.

------
up_and_up
Another option for investing in Robotics is to just seek out funds that focus
on that domain like [https://ark-funds.com/arkq](https://ark-funds.com/arkq)

------
mrfusion
Any fun robotics jobs out there? That’s one of my dreams.

~~~
fermienrico
I like working in unflashy industries. A robot that can harvest peaches
(incredibly hard) or work in semiconductor industry. Lots of robots automating
the shit out of a very complex process. Toilet roll mills. Anything at 3M.

There is a whole world out there and potentially more fun than trying to
invent a 4 legged thing that just looks cool and doesn’t do anything useful.

We need to make it cool to automate clothes manufacturing.

~~~
modeless
I've always wanted to work on a peach harvesting robot, having grown up on a
peach farm. You're right that it's an incredibly hard problem.

We actually had an automated peach harvester when I was a kid. It worked by
encircling the base of the tree with a huge net and then shaking the tree
trunk to make the peaches all fall into the net. It worked poorly and bruised
the peaches too much to be used, so it sat and rusted away. A useful peach
harvesting robot must pluck each peach individually.

