Autonomous Mobile Industry

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Autonomous mobile robots - move ground platform from point A to B by calculating the optimal path from a map and navigating around obstacles using sensor data

Industry Applications

• Warehouse logistics - Locus, Geek+
• Delivery robots - PostMates, TinyMile
• Lawn mowing - Electric Sheep, Scythe Robotics
• Farming - Monarch Tractor
• Cleaning - iRobot, AvidBots
• Security - Cobalt Robotics
• Self Driving Cars - Cruise, Motional
• Navigation Software - Polymath robotics, MovelAI

Outlook - not so good

• Nuro - layoffs
• FedEx - shutdown
• Amazon Scout - shutdown
• ArgoAI - shutdown

Problems from people I met

• Warehouse robotics CEO - stream large 3D point cloud data to navigate around overhead obstacles (right now they use 2D)
• ML Engineer in Robotic vision company - How to detect lanes from streams
• Tech Lead from delivery robot company - How to develop good distributed systems

Required engineering skills

• C++ - programs need to be fast because they’re real time, 1ms delay can kill somebody like in self-driving cars
• Navigation and Path Planning algorithms
• Distributed systems - sensor nodes publish data to a topic, algorithm nodes calculate best path from that topic, algorithm nodes publish desired move command to another topic
• Continuous Integration and Deployment - robot systems involve a lot of software pieces, and need to be developed in a safe and automated way to not break the full system

Sensors involved

• Radars - high range low accuracy
• Lidars - low range high accuracy
• Computer Vision - obstacle detection, semantic segmentation like image depth