- [Woman] This is Kevin, B roll scene one, take two.
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- Gazebo is an open source, 3D robotics simulator.
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- I'm not sure if I should say it,
it's integrated with ROS
because it's kind of its own thing.
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- We've done demos and shows where kids try it out
and they say that was really cool,
but you'd really need to work on your graphics
and then we say, we got the physics right,
it's really a careful system
that simulates this very complex environment
and then also has all of this autonomous code running in it,
but that's not what they see.
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- It looks just like a video game,
it's a 3D world with objects
and there is a robot moving there,
the difference from a video game
is that the physics is very realistic
and it is receiving the same controls
that you would send to a real robot,
so it's really simulating the real world,
unlike a video game that may have some special effects
and some physics shortcuts,
but it's just like a video game more than the robots live.
- I'll have fire pits here now,
so it was a great time
when an intern showed up
and he was here before anyone else was in the office,
but he still had WiFi connection,
so he's able to log into the PR2
and tell the OPT to open the door for him.
(giggling)
So he was able to get in the office
without actually having a key or badge
'cause he left it at home,
that could be the first,
use case for home robotics, right?
Everyone's trying to get into the home robotics space,
what you really need is just a robot to turn off the gas
or your stove, open the door for you,
put away the groceries.
- Nate came to Willow as an intern,
he was the perpetual intern actually.
I think he was the longest intern
at Willow Garage before he became full-time.
- I don't know why he had assigned to me
'cause he knew more than I did.
I remember asking him when I interviewed,
like, what's your kind of schedule,
do you roll in at 10
'cause that's how most of us are?
and he's like, no, I start work at 6:00 AM.
- It's part of his like time in his PhD created Gazebo
and so he kind of brought Gazebo into the full day
at Willow and provided the ROS bindings
to work well with ROS.
- So suddenly we had a simulation component
because Nate was there, right?
And he contributed and made it work seamlessly with ROS.
- It has always been a passion of mine
and I never really thought it would go anywhere,
but it was great to have funding backing
and other that found it useful.
So that was cool and scary because now people need
to use it and want to use it,
so it has to work.
- In the early days at Willow,
we had a real scarcity of hardware.
I remember that first summer when we had,
I think 20 interns show up
and there were maybe two and a half robots.
And so having a good simulation environment
allows you to have potentially everybody with a computer,
be able to test what they're doing all the time
without needing access to either the physical hardware,
which might be scarce or fragile or expensive
as well as the physical environment in which to test it.
- People who are just learning robotics,
they need physical robots,
they become a lot more excited and inspired
by physical robots.
We want you to have conquered that simulation
then becomes like your next toolkit,
because you wanna work on more expensive
or more complicated robots and those are harder to get.
- I think the problem is that
in simulation you can get almost anything to work.
When you see a robot do something in simulation,
you're obligated to ask,
okay, but does this actually work in reality?
(robot engine running)
- Can I adjust and try and follow the wall right now?
(robot engine running)
When you've written something
and you get it out there running
and it actually doesn't do something reasonable
on the first try,
but it takes time to improve it and get it do
what you want it to do.
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So, we are in my kitchen in Newbury Park, California
and this is where I do most of my robotics challenge work.
When my kids were little,
I was really busy with them,
but as they started going to pre-school and school,
I had more time to do things outside of just being a dad.
And so I've been doing robotics challenges
to continue learning about coding and robotics,
it's has been an enjoyable way to learn.
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- The Space Robotics Challenge came our way in early 2017.
So, Valkyrie is a humanoid robot developed by NASA,
the goal of Valkyrie is to assist humans in space endeavors.
So the DARPA robotics challenge,
there was a set of canned tasks
and each task would operate independently
and we were a little bit nervous
that we made it too hard.
- The first task that the robot had to complete
was that a satellite dish was knocked out of alignment
by the storm and so the Valkyrie robot
had to walk up the dish
and then use its hands or other appendages
to adjust the dish to point back at the earth
so the robot could do what is needed to do.
The next task was that the power generation was damaged,
so Valkyrie had to grab a solar panel
and move it over a table, open it up
and then connect it to the main array
and so that involved again,
both walking and manipulation by the robot.
- So Space Robotics Challenge was one
by team coordinated robotics,
single person team, run by Kevin Knoedler.
- And that was amazing,
especially coming from like my experience
with robotics challenges
and then around the DARPA robotics challenge
where you had teams of 20, 30 people,
or even more over all working together just
to get a robot to do these really seemingly simple tasks.
- Earlier I had worked with groups of people,
but at this particular time,
I was coaching two odyssey of the mind teams,
two soccer teams helping at school
and I wasn't sure you need to really be able
to work with people to be able to coordinate it,
so I decided just to go for this on my own.
- So, having Kevin come in
and say, yeah, I can get this robot
to do all this stuff by myself,
was pretty amazing.
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- He has a progression and if he keeps this up,
this will be like a job, he's making enough money
to actually count as a full-time job.
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- After the Space Robotics Challenge,
I had the opportunity to run my code
from the Space Robotics Challenge on the Valkyrie.
I traveled out to New England
and on the first day I was there,
I was able to run that code
from the simulation on the Valkyrie robot
and get the Valkyrie robot
actually complete one of the tasks.
Normally that takes weeks to get something up
and running on a humanoid robot,
bashed into things fall over,
is lined up and now it is turning the handles
on the first day.
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So that was a huge success,
a lot of people were really happy to see that going
from Gazebo to the real world in one day,
that was a really good simulation and a really good time
between the two packages.
- He went there and in a couple of days,
he adapted all of the code that he had done a simulation
and ran it on the robot and it just worked
and he had never seen the robot before.
And I think this speaks
about the power of simulation, right?
Because you can really test your things in simulation
and then transfer them to a physical robot,
much more easily.
- It's kind of just rewarding and satisfying
to see someone be this successful
in a complex and challenging domain,
then you know you've done something right.
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- So many advances in robotics have come
from the hardware and software
that were developed at Willow Garage,
that I'm really not sure where robotics today would be,
if it hadn't been for Willow.
- If Willow hadn't come along,
we would not have a coherent global community
around robot software.
- ROS in particular has had a good accelerating impact
on the industry.
It's been possible for people
who couldn't play in this game to play
and that's important.
- It is a very interesting and powerful model
that I hope people in the future say,
Oh, that was good, let's try that again
for some new discipline that we want to advance.
- These days, the locus of energy
is really in the commercial applications
and now we're seeing this explosion of robotics companies
and by and large they're in some way
or another using ROS.
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- Definitely the experience I had at Willow
was foundational to being able to start a company,
to having more insight
into what space I should caring about.
- I think the core source of innovation at Willow Garage
was that connection to the users,
it was just so organic
and I knew when we started Zipline,
I wanted to create the same thing.
- Yeah this one of the highlights of my career, right?
I'm hoping that Savioke eclipses that for me
and then we get lots and lots of robots out in the world,
but this was the thing that kind of brought everything
I had learned and done together.
And this was the chance to kind of really do something big
for the world and I'm really proud of it.
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