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PyRobot (pyrobot.org)
212 points by davidfoster 5 days ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 37 comments





Man, another (potential) foundational AI/ML/Robotics library from Facebook. At some point every major open source library in this field is going to be run out of a FAANG company. I wonder what the impact of this will be in the long run.

I've thought about this a LOT, more specifically about the implications of the fact that open source projects are treated as _both_ communities AND code as a single entity at the same time instead of independently so.

This gives the owner of the project a large amount of weight not only in the direction of the project's code, but also in the community as a whole, which can have some substantial negative impacts I believe.

With many open source projects started by non-companies, you end up with community leaders who are a few people in the scene who started the project or contributed to it heavily and care about the space a lot. Most importantly, their views are affected largely by the community -- they're "one with the community" so-to-speak.

With the introduction of large companies managing OSS projects, there is a new aspect in which sub-communities grow. This allows for one side of the community (almost never the company's side) to become "a group of people to communicate our changes to" rather than a group of people to actually collaborate with.

I could list several examples of this happening, but I don't want to anger anyone from these companies against me personally and don't feel like creating a throwaway account.

Treating OSS projects as communities and code has some nice qualities, and certainly having paid engineers from companies working on these projects has nice properties, too, but we're not honest with ourselves about the downsides and risks and people regularly give _more_ weight to projects created by companies without warrant (I've seen 20% projects by Google on the front page of /r/programming without even so much as a README -- something that would never happen if it wasn't "created by a FAANG")


Foundational seems like a strong word here - this is a thin wrapper on top of two popular components from ROS (Navigation and MoveIt), and bringup for a specific robot (LoCoBot).

I appreciate the effort here though - ROS feels like it's become harder to use due to stale documentation, and there's value in providing a simple python API that abstracts the underlying bringup.

However looking through the wrapper and its documentation, it doesn't feel like it's making it much simpler by hiding away standard ROS tools.


Yeah, as a robotics + ML researcher at Stanford I can confirm I've looked over this and was not that impressed; our own lab already has a version of this, as do most robotics lab. It's nice that it's open source but it's not that feature-rich.

One impact is that a $5,000 robot is labeled as a "a low cost" robot.

Not really. That's just sadly the state of whats "low cost" in that market, regardless if you work in FAANG, traditional industries or academia.

Robots are expensive unfortunately. In particular good actuators seem to cost a bomb.

It's relatively low cost.

I think a big reason that AI/ML/Robotics is closely associated with FAANG companies is that these are very expensive fields to get into compared to web development or CLI utilities. FAANG companies can also move much faster than FOSS efforts when it comes to putting together great teams.

There was a REALLY good comment on FOSS vs. closed source commercial software that was brought up a couple weeks ago, which I wish I could quote verbatim but unfortunately you'll have to deal with my paraphrased version:

> "In early UNIX days, we got things done on computers using lots of small tools that did one thing well because compute resources and developer talent were both in scarce supply. Nowadays, software companies can put together teams that can manage huge monoliths of software. In order for FOSS to thrive, we need to put less time into trying to beat these companies at their own game (e.g. code behemoths like the ones you see on Linux desktop projects) and focus more on making great tools that do one thing really well (e.g. cURL, GNU Readline)"

ML/AI is also really hard because it requires people to establish much stronger interfacing standards between the important steps of the data analysis process AND the substeps within those steps. Keras[2] was an enormous step forward in this regard, but the creator now works at Google and I assume he isn't very interested in continuing to make Keras the standard frontend for Deep learning model specification.

HuggingFace[1] Is an awesome counterexample to this trend of AI/ML being lead by FAANG. I'm fiending for an opportunity to check out Thinc, but I'm quite occupied with security coursework these days.

1: https://angel.co/company/hugging-face 2: https://keras.io/


A barebone, swiss-knife solution for a DIY lab at $1.5k might help here? I had to get it up and working last year for a local meetup at high-school and lateral professional level. The article is not in English language but the four referred links are, so here it goes: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/azzerare-con-poco-il-debito-t...

Am I the only one who associates the name ‘Pyrobot’ with the idea of an autonomous flame-launcher?

It might indeed be possible to build your own pyrobot using PyRobot.

What could possibly go wrong?

Readers of this thread may be interested in lower cost options. I built a middle school robotics curriculum around Dexter GoPiGo robots: https://www.dexterindustries.com/gopigo3/

While you can do visual/block based coding on these, it also has built in Python support and the whole curriculum I ran was Python based.

My criteria for selection of this platform included: - support for Grove sensors - flexibility in machining own parts if desired - Python support - rPi based

(no affiliation with this company, just a positive real world end-user/educator experience)


Is your curriculum online?

Yes please share any links if possible educator here as well

More cash in advance spares the time needed for mechanics, mechatronics & software DIY hassle... which on the other hand are the most formative activities to learn robotics for real.

Looking over the robots they support, low cost means about "thousands of dollars" in this context, right?

Yeah, it's currently ~5k USD for a (pre-assembled) robot arm that is marginally "useful" (and there are several brands/makers at that price point). I've heard of some that are trying to push towards the ~3k price point, with somewhat poorer tolerances.

I'm excited for the time in the near future when a useful robot arm costs roughly as much as a good laptop i.e. ~1k USD.

At that point, it'll become feasible for hobbyists to get one each and start playing around. Which will lead to an explosion in the variety of things tried, and will positively feed back into creating a healthy community, tons of software which makes it easier for the next set of people to get involved, etc. Much like the PC revolution in the 80s/90s.

At the moment, they're kinda like overpriced toys (for a home user / enthusiast point of view) without a killer app.


We need a breakthrough in low-speed, high torque, lightweight motors and geardowns. Basically if we can get economies of scale up on BLDC motors with higher numbers of poles (think hoverboard motors but lighter), and figure out how to mass manufacture harmonic drives, that'll open up the door to all kinds of low cost robotics.

Odriverobotics already has brought down the barrier to BLDC servomotor control.

Or this thing: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8613852


Two thoughts: 1) I haven't seen any clear literature on efficiency of affordable servos. It seems like existing technology must be very efficient, given the pretty uniform torque/power ratio I've seen across the servo market.

2) One of the biggest financial roadblocks I've run across in robotics isn't about the torque available in affordable servos, it's about the ability to get force feedback. Servos/motors are useless for the large set of tasks requiring force feedback, without the additional complexity of building a current sensor and calibrating it. We need a cheap servo with integrated force feedback and an easy means of autocalibration (from a quick search, seems like this feature usually doubles or tripples the cost of an identical servo).


Torque/efficiency is still a big issue. A coworker and I put together all the math and specs for a robot which could "cook breakfast", just to see what a PoC would take. For anything approaching human arm levels of strength, in that form factor, you are looking at SWG servos. These are nominally 70-80% efficient, but that drops after a few thousand cycles, if you operate in higher loading regimes [1]. so cooling/maintenance is super important. Planetary gears are also not great efficiency-wise and are heavier.

Force feedback is also super important and challenging.

We just need like, synthetic actin :) Disney is actually working on that [2]. yeah it looks super inefficient but so were vacuum tubes before transistors.

1] https://eeepitnl.tksc.jaxa.jp/mews/EN/19th/text/206.pdf&ved=...

2] https://studios.disneyresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/0...


Interesting! Thank you for all the great information. I'm opening those links from a mobile app, and both ended up as not found (not 404, but as the sites internal unrecognized URL page). Are they live for you?

That progression mirrors many others - but more recently, it makes me think of 3D printing and related making technologies like laser cutters and CNC mills.

Good 3D printers can now be had for under 1k USD – and if you can tolerate some tinkering and modifications $300-$500 can get you decent results as well.


There's a version of the TurtleBot kit with an arm for under $3k

https://www.trossenrobotics.com/interbotix-turtlebot-2i-mobi...

The arms themselves appears to be in the 400-600 range


Is there any use to servo based arms other than to let students discover the word “IK”

> I'm excited for the time in the near future when a useful robot arm costs roughly as much as a good laptop i.e. ~1k USD.

I feel like people have been saying this is the "near future" for 20 years now.


The expensive bits are mainly the arms. Strictly speaking there is nothing stopping you from running it on one of those sub-hundred bots from AliExpress.

Cool, but the main problem I have is that I don't have a robot to program and the complexity to build one is way too high for me.

I used to coach a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) Team for my son's high school. The main Robotics competition for middle/high schools are based on the FTC Pitsco TETRIX, FRC AndyMark, VEX Robotics Platforms.

You can find the majority of hardware and electronics you need for basic robotics from the following sites:

https://www.pitsco.com/

https://www.vexrobotics.com/

https://www.andymark.com/

http://www.revrobotics.com/

https://www.servocity.com/actobotics

The high costs come into play when you have to deal with high precision servos with high torque. The Trossen Robotics site gives you an example of high precision servos and pricing.

https://www.trossenrobotics.com/

You can find cheaper robotics options at the following site

https://www.robotshop.com/

When you run a team you start with a budget in the low Ks and build out the equipment inventory over several years. There is high attrition in many of the electronic parts (Servos, Controllers, Sensors) when you compete.

Building basic robots is not complex. Basic navigation using techniques such as dead reconing, etc are not complicated. What is complex is advanced software techniques for navigation, motion planning, etc which rely on some complex math.

Have Fun!


This is built on ROS by the looks of it. Most robotics users run everything in simulations anyway (have a look at UR arms). At a basic level look at Turtlebot. You can add all sorts of sensors, simulate environments and even realistic physics.

Even with things like pre-defined movement areas and collision boxes, arm planning software sometimes completely freaks out and produces weird plans that would probably break things. So it's always good to visualise before sending the commands to the physical system.

Gazebo is a common environment: https://community.arm.com/developer/research/b/articles/post...


Thank you! I didn’t realize it was that common. Seems very useful for building robot AI without needing to keep your robot safe In the process.

AWS Robomaker gives you simulated Gazebo environments to play with. It aims to be an industrial-strength CI/CD environment for PR testing in simulation before deploying to hardware (where bugs can have kinetic consequences) so it is reasonably featureful.

(Not affiliated, just have friends that work there)


anyone else wonder/worry what Facebook wants to do with robots...?

How much does it cost to build the locobot?

Is this an alternative to ros?

It’s built on top of ROS



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