Deep Learning Robot | Hacker News Reader

Deep Learning Robot

autonomous.ai

54 pointsnikolay9 comments

$400 bot base $200 TK1 $200 Asus camera $50 speaker $25 shipping

That leaves $125 for Autonomous. And they're installing TensorFlow, Caffe, Torch, CUDA, cuDNN, Ubuntu?

Is this the deal it looks like?

As an aside: I just recently bought one of their standing desks. It's amazing. After looking at MANY other desks, I was amazed at the build quality they were able to get at the price point for the desk.

The price point is impressive. So is "Same-day shipping". It's not one of those "wait for the next batch" Kickstarter-like operations. They even offer financing.

It is a good deal, but a robot is at least 50% about the control software. Putting a deep learning algorithm on wheels is not necessarily going to make a great robot. It will definitely be an awesome research tool and it is open source so there could be interesting control systems developed fairly quickly. However, if you are not a robotics researcher it would probably help to see some demos first.

ROS is the state of the art in open robot control and you get the drivers for that out of the box (mostly because it seems they deliberately chose hardware which is super well supported by it already).

Out of the box this thing is going to be able to map rooms and do navigation (stock ROS features).

You can find some cool videos of this stuff on YouTube; they don't really need to release any new software.

I know a bunch of people who are into ROS and this is basically the hardware they've all converged on, except they slapped a laptop on the pedestal.

Not really sure about the deep learning bit though; I guess that's the part you have to add... to be fair, it's basically a bit of marketing. This is not a game changer by any means but it's nice hardware.

Looking forward to being able to add a cheap lidar like sweep to these daleks.

[I have an iRobot create base with a Kinect and Intel NUC frankensteined on top; this is the 2016 version of that]

Very cool. Thank you for the clarification. Is there a general name for these ROS kinect bots with the hardware and software combined? ROS is the general OS, right? Are there open source control systems on top of ROS or is ROS pretty much the control layer on a regular OS? I was under the impression that ROS is the framework bits to make the control software easier to write, but the control software is still diy (which is why I recommended robot researchers/enthusiasts). Expecting a smart robot off the shelf seems like a lot of people might set themselves up for disappointment.

ROS isn't really an operating system but a framework to combine robotics-related code into one running system via a publisher/subscriber model. You'd typically run it on ubuntu as the actual OS

you actually can get an (90%) autonomous robot off the shelf, if you just want a differential-drive base with a lidar or kinect sensor. Most of the work is done for you in the ROS modules, it's just a matter of knowing which ones to use, installing them and getting them to communicate over the correct channels.

Well, thankfully not all companies are greedy to search 50%+ margin. In this case, the little left for them is, most probably, all their direct or indirect expenses. Maybe the idea is to bring awareness to their other products, from which they still make a modest profit.

Thanks for that recommendation; I just went to check out their desks and they look really good, especially at that price point. I might buy one of them soon.

In my experience the Tegra K1 is rather limited as a deep learning platform. A Tegra X1 would easily fit in this platform, and is about twice as powerful (at about twice the cost, admittedly). In fact, for a slow-moving ground robot such as this I would consider a laptop with one of the mobile Nvidia GPUs, such as the GT960M. This would be more expensive of course (just the laptop would probably be more than $1k) but it'd be far easier to work with.

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