Robot as Software

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Command Line Heroes • • Robot as Software | Command Line Heroes

Robot as Software | Command Line Heroes

About the episode

Building a physical robot isn’t cheap—even when it’s the final version. Designing a robot and testing it over and over again? That takes a lot of tries. And likely more than a few failures on the way to success. Luckily, simulation software is reducing the scrap heap—and bringing down the costs of building robots from the ground up.

Kevin Knoedler shares how simulation software allows him to program and design robots from home. And even though he doesn’t have the budget or support of major research institutions like DARPA, his robots still end up winning major competitions. Evan Ackerman points out that winning those competitions takes a lot of skills. But amateurs have more ways than ever to get started with robotics. Louise Poubel explains how much time, energy, and money is saved with robot simulation software—and how it’s not just for the amateurs. And Dr. Timothy Chung reveals how competitions like the DARPA Subterranean Challenge encourage innovators to advance the field of robotics.

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A dust storm is ripping across the surface of Mars, headed toward a humble set of buildings. The first human settlement on another planet. Martian dust storms like this one are incredibly powerful. As it hits, it tears open a wall of the habitat, flips over the solar array, and bends back the communication antenna. Years of labor, ruined. Unless... Emerging from the dust cloud is a humanoid robot called Valkyrie, NASA's only hope. With the right programming, Valkyrie can patch that air leak, deploy a new solar panel, and realign the antenna. But this level of robotic finesse has never been attempted. Luckily, back on earth, a stay-at-home dad named Kevin has everything under control. The disaster scenario you just heard was imagined by NASA, back in 2015. They laid it all out as part of their space robotics challenge. Then they invited anybody and everybody to try and solve it. How do you program Valkyrie to execute all those fixes? It sounds like the kind of challenge only huge teams of people can tackle, but that stay-at-home dad I mentioned, Kevin Knoedler, he really figured it out. He won NASA's challenge. And Knoedler never had access to a Valkyrie robot. He figured everything out from his kitchen desk while taking care of two kids. He could do that because robotics has opened up. It's now a software-first field, a field where anybody with a laptop and the right know-how can be a hero. I'm Saron Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. This season, we're exploring the difference between robot fiction and robot fact. What did we imagine our robots would be, and what did they turn into in reality? In the movies, robots are often designed and controlled by a secretive elite. We imagine that you need endless resources and powerful institutions to bring something like WALL-E and Johnny 5 to life, and that's not entirely wrong, but we've discovered that a leap forward in robotics doesn't always require expensive hardware and giant labs. It can happen in the free and open world of software. The real robot future is being built by open source heroes, all around the world. Dad, I'm going to be late for school. Contributing from the middle of their everyday lives. Doing robotics contests while parenting is interesting. Kevin Knoedler lives in Newbury Park, California. When he won NASA's space robotics challenge, his kids were 9 and 11. When they were younger, he could only do robotics work when they were asleep. Now that they're in school, he's got the bandwidth to save a colony on Mars. It's really just one computer. I don't think I'd be allowed to keep it on the kitchen table. I have a desk set up in the kitchen. We actually have all of our computers set up in the kitchen, so when we're all home together, we're all in the same room, either going to school or working on things and such. In between helping with homework, Knoedler is able to take part in major robotics challenges because he can take advantage of new software that's revolutionized the field, opening it up to people like him. It doesn't require a huge amount of equipment or investment to be able to do a simulation contest like that. For one thing, the internet is at his disposal. Knoedler can do arcane troubleshooting, drawing on a planet of experts, but there's also ROS, the Robot Operating System, which we mentioned in episode one. ROS gives him a ready-made set of tools, a suite of crucial middleware. It really is a common standard that a lot of robotics packages are built on. And so, rather than having to integrate and find what you need, a lot of that is already integrated and working within ROS. Just as important as that toolkit though, there's a powerful new simulation software. That NASA contest, for example, was a simulation contest. Meaning, nobody had to build a physical robot. You didn't even need to have access to one of NASA's Valkyries. You could solve the whole thing using simulation software for the desk in your kitchen. You had to pick these tools up off the table with the humanoid robot, get them oriented correctly within the limitations of that robotic arm, and then use them to search the wall for leaks. All these granular details could be manipulated using an open source simulation program called Gazebo. Knoedler only needed an Nvidia graphics card to run it. And once you're working in a simulation, just imagine how that frees you up to experiment. When you're talking humanoid robotics, for example, every time you run the humanoid robot into something or fall over, you can do tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of times in simulation. In real life, you might get 10 or 20 tries before you just break the robot. Yeah. Robots are expensive. And until you've got a final product, every trial is potentially destructive. But with simulation software, you can crash land your robot a million times at no cost. You can test scenarios that would be impossible or way too expensive to test in real life. It made it much more easy for me to be competitive in that contest. And like I said, I was able to do that from home just because simulation allowed me to experiment as much as I wanted without the costs. But hang on, does simulation software actually give you a faithful representation of the real world? Are the physics engines good enough that what works in simulation will definitely work in a physical robot? There's always going to be a reality gap between simulation and the real world. Evan Ackerman is a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. He covers robotics. The real world is very complicated and simulation is necessarily a simplification of the real world. So there are always going to be things that work perfectly in simulation that just don't work, or don't work as well in the real world. On the other hand, that reality gap is narrowing all the time. And there are benefits to simulation that go way beyond just saving money. Simulation also lets you do things like prototype much more rapidly. It lets you test a much wider variety of scenarios. You can test your robot in environments that might be too dangerous for the real robot, or situations that are just difficult to set up in the real world. Plus, because it's software, you can share those simulations with anybody in the world. Other roboticists can build on your work. If I run simulations and my simulations work really well, I can just send you the files and you can run the exact same simulation and you know for sure that it's going to work exactly the same way for you as it worked for me. Whereas if I build a physical robot and I want to share that with you, I have to manufacture another robot and ship it to you, which is expensive and complicated. Those advantages have brought simulation to the center of robotics research. And a key player in this transformation has been an open source simulator called Gazebo. Louise Poubel is the technical lead for Ignition at Open Robotics, the organization that maintains Gazebo. So Gazebo is a 3D robotics simulator that's been around for about 15 years. It simulates sensors, it simulates actuators, so motors and things like that. It simulates physics, so things fall, they collide with other things. And it also simulates the environment. So you can create these worlds that have all sorts of things. You can have a Mars environment, you can have an underwater environment. Before Gazebo, robotics simulation was largely a proprietary affair. Commercial software was expensive and often limited. Open source alternatives were few and far between. What's really great about having an open source simulator is that users can modify it to their needs. If there's a sensor that's not supported, they can go ahead and add support for it. If there's a feature that's missing, they can implement it themselves. And because it's open source, Gazebo has been adopted widely. It's used in research labs, by hobbyists, and in commercial development. It's become the de facto standard for robotics simulation. We have users from all over the world. We have students who are just getting started with robotics, all the way to NASA using it for their Mars missions. So it really spans the whole spectrum. The impact of simulation software like Gazebo goes beyond just making robotics more accessible. It's also accelerating the pace of innovation. When you can test ideas quickly and cheaply, you can try more ideas. Before simulation, if you wanted to test a robot, you had to build the robot, you had to set up the environment, you had to run the test, and if something went wrong, you'd have to debug it, potentially rebuild parts of the robot. Now you can do all of that in simulation first. This shift toward simulation has also democratized robotics in ways that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. Kevin Knoedler's success is a perfect example of this. The barrier to entry has been lowered significantly. You don't need access to expensive hardware, you don't need to be at a major research institution. All you need is a computer and the willingness to learn. But simulation isn't just for individual inventors working from their kitchen tables. Major organizations are using it too, and they're finding that it gives them advantages they never had before. One of the biggest advantages is that you can test scenarios that would be impossible or too dangerous to test in real life. For example, if you're developing a robot for a nuclear disaster, you don't want to wait for a nuclear disaster to test your robot. And simulation allows for a kind of collaboration that wasn't possible before. When everything is software, teams can work together in ways that transcend physical limitations. We can have people all over the world working on the same robot, testing the same scenarios, sharing their results instantly. It's like having a global laboratory where everyone can contribute. This collaborative aspect is particularly important for advancing the field as a whole. When simulation software is open source, improvements made by one team benefit everyone. Every bug fix, every new feature, every improvement that gets contributed back to the project makes the simulator better for everyone. It's a virtuous cycle of improvement. Of course, simulation has its limitations. No matter how sophisticated the software becomes, there will always be aspects of the real world that are difficult to capture. Things like friction, air resistance, the way materials behave under stress—these are all things that simulation tries to model, but the real world is infinitely complex. There will always be surprises when you move from simulation to reality. But even with these limitations, simulation has become an indispensable tool in robotics. It's not replacing real-world testing, but it's making it more efficient and more effective. The best approach is to use simulation and real-world testing together. You do your initial development and testing in simulation, then you validate and refine your work with real hardware. And as simulation software continues to improve, the gap between virtual and real is getting smaller all the time. New techniques like machine learning are being used to make simulations more accurate and more predictive of real-world behavior. We're seeing simulation become more and more realistic. Things like better physics engines, more accurate sensor models, more detailed environmental simulation. It's getting to the point where what works in simulation has a very high probability of working in the real world. This evolution in simulation capability is enabling new kinds of robotics research and development. Projects that would have been impossible or prohibitively expensive are now within reach of individual researchers and small teams. I can experiment with ideas that would cost millions of dollars to test with real hardware. I can try hundreds of different approaches, fail fast, and iterate quickly. It's completely changed how I think about robotics development. And this democratization is having broader effects on the field. When more people can participate in robotics research, you get more diverse perspectives and more innovative solutions. Instead of just having robotics developed by people at major universities and big companies, now you have people from all backgrounds, all parts of the world, contributing to the field. That diversity of thought and experience leads to better robots. But it's not just about making robotics more accessible to individuals. Simulation is also changing how large organizations approach robotics development. Companies can now test ideas much more quickly and cheaply. They can explore a much wider range of possibilities before committing to expensive hardware development. It's making the whole industry more efficient and more innovative. And there's another important aspect to consider. As we mentioned at the beginning of this episode, much of the cutting-edge work in robotics simulation is happening in an open source context. This isn't just a technical choice; it's a philosophical one. I think it's really important that these tools be available to everyone. Robotics has the potential to solve some of the world's biggest problems, but only if we don't restrict access to the tools and technologies needed to develop robots. This open approach stands in contrast to some of the traditional ways of thinking about robotics development. Instead of secretive labs and proprietary technologies, we're seeing a more collaborative and inclusive approach. Rather than having just a few large organizations develop robots and they ship these robots to everybody else in the world, and just impose this view and the needs of these small groups of people onto everybody else. I think it's really important to democratize it a little bit more. Whether you want to democratize the field, or you just want robotics to advance as fast as possible, the answer is the same; get more people involved, open things up and share. So how do we invite more people to the robotic software revolution? We're very much interested in identifying where those brand new ideas might come into play. Timothy Chung is a program manager at DARPA. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These are the folks who brought you GPS and the internet. They know how to build new tech. And Chung, who focuses on robotics, feels that group challenges where people from around the world compete are one of his best tools for inspiring innovations. For example... The DARPA Subterranean Challenge is a worldwide international competition really keen on identifying and discovering technologies for robotic systems that operate in complex underground environments. DARPA's Subterranean Challenge is similar to the NASA challenge I mentioned at the top of this episode, a way for a huge organization to tap the brainpower of the crowd. It's a kind of underground scavenger hunt they've been running since 2019. Teams deliver robots that fly, walk, or roll their way through a system of caves, hunting for objects planted by DARPA. They're testing robots and underground caves because a million bumps and cracks can make them stumble, and they want a robot that can stay the course. Nature has a way of keeping things unpredictable. They want an all-round athlete that can rise to random challenges. DARPA wants to develop robots that can navigate the world's most difficult settings. And yet, despite the very physical nature of this challenge, simulation software is still crucial. It aids in the development of the physical robots of course, but there's also a separate, entirely virtual competition run by DARPA. That one's called the SubT Tech Repo. The virtual competition's like your fantasy football league, where I provide you with 1,000 SubT credits, you get to go to the SubT Tech Repo and pick and choose the different robots that you'd like to add to your fantasy SubT team, and design your algorithms to best suit those robots. Those virtual competitors then modify sensors, or bring in new open source models that they find. They tailor things as they see fit. We've seen that type of vibrant interchange, and that's been phenomenal for the systems teams to see their robots being used; they might learn a thing or two from the virtual competitors. Chung has already seen advancements in code and design philosophy come out of these challenges. It's so much more than a scavenger hunt. So, remember Kevin Knoedler? I'm so hungry. The guy who won that NASA competition by designing a Martian rescue mission from his kitchen? Well, the same guy went ahead and won DARPA's Subterranean Challenge in 2019. And some of the teams he competed against were funded by DARPA. He was David against Goliath. I was quite proud of myself for being able to win a competition against those funded teams. Interestingly, of the top four, three of them were self-funded teams. Software has been an equalizer. Robotics was, for decades, a field where only rich organizations could make big advances, but software has begun to change all that. It's still often those with time and education who get to really dive deep, but the gates are beginning to open. More people than ever are discovering they can contribute. The availability of open source software is a huge deal in terms of making things easier. It makes things possible to do that would not be otherwise possible. And over at DARPA, Timothy Chung doesn't worry that those DARPA-funded teams were beat. In fact, the way he sees it, everybody wins. And meanwhile, every time Knoedler enters a competition, the whole community learns from him and the bar gets raised for next time. He continues to have to up his own game as the community continues to benefit and grow and excel. That's one of the advantages of competitions, it's—we like to call it co-opetition—where you can cooperate and collaborate with your fellow collaborators and competitors alike, and that just elevates everyone's game, at the end of the day. The old fantasies we had about robots, all those movies where robots were designed in secret laboratories, they really got something wrong. Secrets aren't good for innovation. And software, like ROS and Gazebo, mean that every roboticist from every background is invited to the field. New and unconventional solutions can come from anywhere. When I think about the power that open source software has on robotics, the way it democratizes the field and pushes things forward, I have to remind myself that one day, these robots show up in real life too. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge matters because, for example, DARPA might create robots that help us rescue humans from a mining accident or a burning building. The great thing about our robot dreams is that one day they become real. And next time on Command Line Heroes, we're exploring one of the most real moments in robot history. The moment that huge and visible robots arrived on the factory floor. These weren't just simulations or abstract pieces of software, factory robots were taking up space. And deciding how much space they should take up became a global debate. Make sure to catch episode 3, and every episode, by following or subscribing now, wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saron Yitbarek, and this is Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. Until next time, keep on coding.

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Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.