Software We can also run everything over WebRTC. What that does is it lets us do peer-to-peer, over-the-internet communication. So whether you’re running on the same physical box in the same data center, in the same warehouse, or across the planet, there’s a communication channel that works. All of this is authenticated and encrypted. There’s nothing novel about the kinds of security we’re doing. What’s novel is the way we’re applying it to a space and making it easy to have great se-curity out of the box. Who is Viam targeting with its solution? I think it’s everyone from: • Someone building production robots • Hobbyists who want to tinker and make robots to play with their cat • Researchers trying to work on new SLAM algorithms • Hardware experts trying to come up with a new design for a novel robotic arm • Educators who want to teach high schoolers how to build robots I’m not saying we have every use case nailed perfectly today in the public beta. But one of the key things is that we want it to be easy to move from space to space. Everything is designed to be flexible so that your system can move from space to space as it progresses from prototype to production. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is one of the popular platforms for robotics development. Is ROS a competitor or will your solution work on top of ROS? Because of the way we built the system, we can work with or around anything. If you already have a robot running ROS at a low level but you need a way to do teleoperation or data man-agement, you can write a wrapper for that in our system and then still use the lower-level pro-cess. So they can coexist, if needed. Our goal is to make it easy to write software to bring the learning curve down as short as it can be. ROS has done amazing things in the robotic space.
48
November 2022
Viam Q&A_11-22_Vs2.indd 48
What’s on your roadmap for higherlevel functions? Cloud configuration and logging management are there today. So you can see all of your robots deployed, where they are and what they’re doing. You can also have a full-tail operation out of the box. If you want to build a robot that your end user can drive around from an iPhone app, you can do that today. Today, we also make it easy to work with data. Robots use a variety of sensors that take data from the real world and do something with it. We’re able to collect all that data. The data is first stored locally on the robot and then, based on the configuration, is uploaded to the cloud at a cer-tain speed and at a certain frequency where there are APIs to do whatever you want with it. Over time, we’re working on making it easy to deploy new versions of code. How do you do that in a safe way where you can’t go and break robots in the field? Let’s get new software tested on five robots, then deploy it to 1%, 10% and 50% of the robots. How do you handle things like roll-backs and mistakes? How do you deploy code versus new machine learning models? Those are things that are coming very soon. What can we expect from Viam in the near future? We are investing heavily in the platform. We’re hiring more engineers in all sorts of different are-as, whether it’s in SLAM, computer vision or deploying robots. We’re investing heavily for the long term. This is a public beta, and we would love people to try it and give us feedback. I’m sure we made some mistakes, but we want to understand the kinds of challenges people are having, what works, what is working well with the platform today, the issues they have with it, and the features that they need to go even faster. RR
www.therobotreport.com
THE ROBOT REPORT
11/4/22 12:20 PM
