AutonoMusings - Fewer Home Robots, More Autonomous Trucks

By Joshua Ouellette • Issue #14 • View online

I had a bit of a realization this week. FIRST Robotics is 27 years old and 515,000 students will participate in its various programs this year alone. That’s a massive reach.

Even though I was on one of the early teams in high school and have coached FIRST Lego League teams over the years, I hadn’t—until now—quite realized how big FIRST had gotten or appreciated how long it’s been around.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, FIRST started off as an international robotics competition for high schoolers building 120-pound robots, but expanded its reach all the way to elementary schools with FIRST Lego League.

I’m willing to bet I’m nowhere near being the only person reading this newsletter to have started working in robotics because of FIRST. It’s a force for getting kids interested in STEM, and its impact can be profound.

Here’s the ask. We’re coming up on FIRST Lego League season. Please volunteer. It can be as low a commitment as a single Saturday helping out at a local competition.

It will be fun. It will make a difference.

- Josh

“We are the only sport that every kid in school can participate in and then turn pro.” - Dean Kamen, c0founder of FIRST

This Week in Autonomous Vehicles

Uber Ends Its Self-Driving Truck Project

This week, Uber decided to stop developing autonomous trucks and refocus all of its efforts on passenger vehicles. At first, this sounds like there’s now one less player in the space, but I’ve heard talk of at least three teams of ex-Uberers forming new startups to stay in the race. We’ll see which ones manage to successfully hit the road.

www.npr.org • Share

The Quest for Home Robotics

There are plenty of things we all wish robots could do around the house… clean the dishes, cook dinner, walk the dog. But the intersection between technical feasibility, consumer price points, and user need is proving elusive. That isn’t stopping people from trying.

Mayfield Robotics Powers Down Kuri...

Kuri showcased a lot of interesting design ideas. I’m a fan of the simplicity of the heart light as a form of robot expression. It’s sad to see an obviously talented team pour years of effort into a product and then see it shuttered.

www.heykuri.com • Share

But Big Tech Keep Chasing the Dream.

From a robotic version of the Echo to an educational robot from Huawei, the interesting thing about large tech companies pursuing home robotics is the variety of ideas they have about what might find a market.

www.seattletimes.com • Share

Advancing the State of the Art

Learning Dexterity

After one hundred years of simulation, Open AI used reinforcement learning to program a remarkably dexterous hand. It’s hard to not see human-like motion in the results. Watch the video!

blog.openai.com • Share

Learning Dexterity - YouTube

OpenAI Close to Mastering DOTA 2

Human dominance in yet another video game appears close to falling.

Even though several steps remain to be conquered between playing DOTA and successfully applying similar reinforcement learning techniques to robotics, I still think Google and OpenAI’s rapid progress strongly hints at the future.

www.cnet.com • Share

Paper Spotlight: Point Completion Networks

Are you trying to overcome occlusion and low point density in LIDAR point clouds? This paper uses a Point Completion Network that uses geometric clues to fill in the gaps and infer the missing points. A future version could make a useful pre-filter for classifiers operating on LIDAR data.

arxiv.org • Share

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By Joshua Ouellette

This newsletter was made with love by RavenOps in San Francisco

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