Steve talks about his story in robotics, his view on service robotics, practical challenges they faced during the design & deployment of their hotel delivery robot.
The most spot-on line I found in this talk:
“Robotics is the poor stepchild of every other industry”
This will be a quick one.
Coloured lights are a hint of heavenly glitter. They add awesomeness to everything.
Some examples:
With love,
Your fellow roboticists.
—
For reader reference, the video below is now in the process of getting cut to pieces & hugely misinterpreted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0_DPi0PmF0
Seriously. Don’t we have enough people already freaking out due to the recent years’ military adoption of drone technology?
Your work is good. Amazing. The best animated dolls ever. You have more experience in robotics than I do. But this is not the way to present your work, no matter what! The shortest line that can be misunderstood when cut in the proper way will be the one circulated around. The joke was awkward even for a roboticist.
For a few minutes of fame you just made yourself and the rest of us look like irresponsible crazy scientists. It doesn’t even do you good as you scared so many people and fuelled endless conspiracy/robot-takeover/singularity theories that tips the acceptance of robots all the way to the negative scale.
We should be concentrating on making people’s lives easier, safer, more meaningful, more pleasant, whatever that is for good, not freaking them out with human-looking dolls talking BS!
Then there are already some famous & smart people who are half-educated on recent AI/Robotics talk fearful nonsense, such as Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and others. Do you want to join that club?
Cheers from a fellow roboticist,
Bence
—
Dear non-robotics people,
Please don’t believe sci-fi level stuff you see on TV.
For a good anecdotal overview of robotics I recommend reading Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks.
They say an engineered system is only as good as the worst performance it can give. If you would like to see how the best top-level humanoid research groups failed outside of their labs:
For a full picture on the Darpa Robotics Challenge many references can be found all over the internet or if you are from the US you can watch this documentary by PBS.
Ask me questions if you have any.
Kind regards,
Bence
I had to deal with a monstrous-size Java project that only works with Eclipse Mars. Like a good power-user I downloaded the installer and installed it fine, started right away and worked fine.
Then after lunch I tried to start up Eclipse it kept crashing and with weird errors related to GTK. Even when it didn’t crash immediately, I couldn’t access anything of the dialogs.
Tried reinstalling, and it worked again. But why?
I realized that it only worked when I started Eclipse Mars from the installer!!!
At this point I had eyebrows raised all the way to the ceiling. What the hell?
A close inspection on the eclipse.ini file showed the difference of the installer-launched Eclipse vs the installed and then launched one. It seems that by default the system goes for GTK 3 which causes things to go south.
Adding the following line to the eclipse.ini in the _installed_ eclipse folder (whereever you install it) solves the startup crash issue:
--launcher.GTK_version 2
A very pleasant book with many anecdotes circulating around the idea that having a passion for something won’t necessarily get you where you’re aiming for. Instead, Newport suggests adopting what he calls ‘the craftsman mindset’. Building rare and valuable skills, that make up your career capital to a point where you will eventually be “So good they can’t ignore you”.
He takes stand against what he calls ‘the passion mindset’ which according to him has a tendency to ask questions like “What can the world offer me?” and “Is this who I truly am?”. These questions put the one adopting the mindset into a constant state of doubtfulness, causing them to be unhappy about their jobs the first moment their passion fades. The ‘Craftsman mindset’ on the other hand focuses on honing your skills and asks “What can I offer the world?”. This gives the ones adopting it the ability to develop a passion for their craft, which is a reward, not an a priori condition.
Side note: I learned about this book from an interview with Andrew Ng: Inside The Mind That Built Google Brain: On Life, Creativity, And Failure. I noticed that some of the books he recommends I have already read or had them on my list except for this particular one. It was definitely a good choice to pick it! If you’re interested, have a look at Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera!
This is the story of Ben Horowitz. Starting as a lowly programmer, then proceeding through several steps on the corporate ladder ending up – as he defines it – a wartime CEO and then finally cashing it all in for the big bag of $$$ and becoming a venture capitalist. There are scenes in this story that are often rude and harsh but he stays at all times very professional and caring for what he does and for with whom he works.
The part that got me a lot is that it seems that during all his career he cared a lot for his work. No fiddling around, no laying low, but pure power and professionalism.
Enduring, navigating and fighting through hard things.
Very energetic, a bit rude and very true.
I’d go straight to the video, but for those who need a bit more motivation to sit through, check my bullet-point summary below.
The main points Mel Robbins goes through are:
2 key slides from the video:
A certainly controversial figure coming from evolutionary biology. He is known for his anti-religious public appearances and publications.
What he is less known for inventing the word meme. It comes from his book “The selfish gene” and stands for a unit of human cultural evolution analogous to the gene. From an evolutionary point of view a meme has the same attributes: reproduction, selfishness and natural selection.
In this book he methodically goes through a handful of ideas and puts them in parallel with evolution. I found it a nice mental exercise.
Let me quote his take on explaining ball games for the roboticists around here.
“When a man throws a ball high in the air and catches it again. he behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory of the ball… at some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.”
—
And for the sake of completeness, I’m also presenting some of his anti-religious quotes. Be advised, they may make sense!
“I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.”
“Religion is about turning untested belief into unshakable truth through the power of institutions and the passage of time.”
“Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings.”
I’ve recently got my a new laptop for work, which is great, but this means I had to abandon all the comfort of OSX.
Of course for work I need an Ubuntu system but I set my eyes on a distribution called Elementary OS before, that is Ubuntu-based but tries to mimic the style of OSX.
To begin the ROS installation a minor tweak is needed on the first step. Instead of
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
use
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
Since ROS doesn’t have packages dedicated to Elementary, this second line tells it to use the Ubuntu Trusty packages instead (on which Elementary OS Freya is based).
However, when I tried to start up the simulation of TIAGo, I got buckets of errors from rosdep about the operating system not being detected. After a quick sneak peak at the code of it, I discovered that there is an environmental variable that can be used to override whatever is happening, as rosdep is supposed to support Elementary OS, it’s the latter that does something fishy here.
I added
export ROS_OS_OVERRIDE=elementary
to my .bashrc, and the problem was solved.
Here is a video of the working system, with the TIAGo robot from PAL Robotics.
So those are my notes on the Elementary OS + ROS topic. For those who’d like to get started with Elementary OS check the links below.
Elementary OS goodies to install,
20 things to do after installing Elementary OS
Do you like Evernote‘s desktop client? NixNote2 provides a fully cross-platform opensource alternative to the official client.
To see if and where your boot process can be optimized, try bootcharting
To see what you can do with your Thinkpad fans and in Linux go here.
Flesh and machines 
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