Post

Also drone delivery is stupid and I hate it

We’re already in WW3 so I’d be building military drones

There's so much cool stuff we could be doing. But instead it's all death machines. As someone who trained in aerospace engineering and had the same dilemma - to go sideways into HVAC or work on weapons - I sympathize.

Open source, but that doesn't fund the efforts at all. Where the hell are *our* billionaires?! Rihanna? Taylor? Beyonce?

I got pretty far into the hiring process at Intuitive Surgical as just a guy who knows Linux before I dropped, without ever having done any kind of robotics before. Not for me, but seems like an interesting place.

That’s not really true, but there are a couple of core things at play. Have you worked in a highly regulated I industry before ? Is the robotics you have been doing a close match to what they do?

Yup - very hard to find money for it in the drone space though right now.

Nvidia is doing a bunch of general robotics stuff too, I guess their chips end up in defense tech but I don't think being on the Jetson team is at all close to working on weapons

Hell, FIRST is heavily sponsored by fucking RTX and their logo is *everywhere*

Yes..I am unemployed. Worked on a team that invented the underwater drone(OpenROV). Now I sell sno cones...

It has, like, ALMOST not been the case in robots a few times, but Amazon eating the whole warehouse business, farm robots being badly positioned, the existence of China, etc. it’s hard! I had to push reeeeeaaaally hard to keep our computer vision business on the “mostly not evil” side of the ledger

It's frustrating. Our technology stacks in robotics at this point is mostly open source tech that drips out of universities and foreign lab and independents sometimes making a funny new actuator. There is no money in US tech unless it involves death or despoiling it's sad.

I will also note that there used to be a LOT of money being directed at purely civilian drone use cases and companies until a couple years ago. Trump 2.0 has had a hugely destructive impact here, especially in the U.S.

There was a period between 2013 to about 2024 or so where it seemed to me like it was going to be possible to have a very viable career in purely civilian and socially-beneficial drone mapping and data analysis work. Not so much now. Perhaps we can get back there, I don’t know.

I nearly bumped into an unexpected robot at my grocery store this evening. It is a "shelf inventory inspector" After I got over the impulse to apologize to it I could only think of Cloud 9's GLEN and how that turned out.

The drone evacuating an injured Ukrainian soldier the other day seems like a bight spot in a dark field

I’m not sure it’s exactly altruistic, but the robotics competitions in China seem to be for the sake of creating various humanoid functions separate from weapons manufacturing. Like it’s a team of total nerds making a funky robot that runs like a human really fast as opposed to Boston Dynamics shit.

Word.

There was plenty money going into co civilian drone mapping tech very recently (still is some, but way less).

sorry, hell of an autocorrect

Sending out my personal swarm seems to back this up at least, it's rough business for robotics outside of for-manufacturing and defense

Disney but yeah that's kinda it

Interesting work being done using drones for avalanche mitigation. Dropping explosives, but to make avalanches instead of killing people.

I feel like in the late 1960s and early 70s there were a lot of plays and novels where people graduating in the sciences had to decide if they'd do defense work. We're right back there.

🥲

I imagine Boston Dynamics level funding is scarce.

Yes, I’m aware. TBH I’m not very interested in ag, so that’s lower down the priority list for me.

SDEV