Huawei's attempts to copycat a T-Mobile robot read like a comical spy movie
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I wish more companies realized all the spying and stealing of information would be unnecessary if they started collaborating on making open source hardware testing equipment. A robot that taps a screen shouldn't be considered a super important trade secret.
I don't get it, it should be so simple. There are three dimensions in which the tapper has to traverse, probably not changing the angle of it either. It probably has some squishiness in the tip, so it doesn't have to be super super precise.
This was in 2012, when there already where 3d-printers with much more harder requirements. Well, sure, this would run 24/7 likely so should have better components and be quite robust.
So, some development but not like inventing anything drastically new. What am I missing?
edit: ah, other comments raise some interesting points regarding detecting state of the phone and apps. I looked at it from mostly a hardware perspective since that's the impression I got from the article.
Quite frankly, you’ve got to wonder about Huawei’s engineering chops if they’re going all spy-vs-spy to steal something that’s 75% available on Github already.
That being said, besides the kinematics, instrumentation for hardware is the tricky part. Getting repeatable and consistent measurement for large production quantities is not an straight forward task. Processing and digesting the results is also another hurdle.
Automated brick-layers come to mind as another 3D positioning task with no pitch or roll, but I'm not familiar enough with the general space to know if they're at all representative. Among other things, I seem to remember they can't corner properly, which suggests they might be operating on a linear axis and a width rather than a proper 3D workspace.
Note possible anti-trust red flag
Anti-trust red flag? That would be a real hard sell to even the most anti-corporate type.
This is probably just part of the general witch hunt the US is undertaking against Huawei.
The jury found for t-mobile.
See, e.g., https://www.geekwire.com/2017/jury-sides-with-t-mobile-in-ca...
They then settled the case.
I don't think witch hunt is the right term, as there was obvious unethical acts (possibly criminal). Although, it is definitely an escalation and I do wish there was more communicating through diplomats than through legal systems.
There are numerous reasons why a civil suit might have failed even when the aforementioned is true.
Moreover, this seems to be not an isolated case, but a systematic behaviour instituted within the organization, and others, including the state.
However ridiculous it is for people to be trying to copy the 'tappy robot' (!!) - this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.
We don't get to automatically assume the position of one player in the value chain (say mobile manufacturer) and assume it would be 'beneficial' to just open source the IP of some supplier.
Every 'buyer' everywhere would want all the 'supplies' as cheaply and freely as possible (!) but it can't usually work that way.
In the article, there's an email referring one person to the 'manufacturer of the robot and not Tmobile' - which I guess indicates that the thing is not made by Tmo but by some 3rd party supplier.
Should that 3rd party who ostensibly invested in designing that thing just 'open source' their products? How would they benefit from that? It's possible they may, but doubtful.
I guess because this isn't exactly 'advanced robotic's it all seems a little clownish, but most of what we make isn't super hight tech, yet laden with specific know how and knowledge.
As a side thought, this is the kind of thing that is wrong with our patent system:
Implementation is confused with invention. The USPTO grants patents for things that any reasonable engineering team would implement given a problem to solve.
Engineering is about problem solving. Not all solutions are inventions. In fact, I would argue that there are very few true inventions these days and that the general rate of true inventions should naturally decline over time.
In other words, the threshold for what should constitute a true patentable invention, given accumulated knowledge, should increase with time.
a few (and i mean very few) examples. Aircraft carrier bought from russia to copy, J-20 stole (allegedly) F-22 designs from the US and modified, segway - ninebot, J-11B fighter they copied from the su-27. The list goes on and on. Here is a link with greate examples and Pictures (https://news.usni.org/2015/10/27/chinas-military-built-with-...).
Again this is not knocking the engineers in China, their reverse engineering is second to none. Reminds me of the "Pakled" on Star Trek TNG, they just aquire all technology from other races and make it work.
Side note, trade secrets != patents. The whole idea between the two is fundamentally different.
In retrospect, it's clear how much that mentality undervalues what was being taught in the course. Yeah, the initial approach might be obvious, but so are plenty more initial approaches. What made it through to the course and was put down in the textbook are the few initial approaches that actually worked.
/Textbooks should have a long list of attempted approaches that seemed great and weren't, but no one publishes failures.
I look at the system as an admission that it's impossible to know, post-hoc, whether something was copied or independently developed.
We wouldn't have a problem with no patents, if we could only determine that.
Agree that it seems like there should be more of an obviousness floor (e.g. "Can a reasonably trained engineer build this in less than a week?").
It is a little ridiculous as you say, but the fact that a company was obviously involved in attempts at industrial espionage makes it kind of serious.
1. How many pictures do you need? It seems they keep sending out pictures and then they send more people to get more pictures. Is there a lot of additional value in additional pictures?
2. How hard is it to reverse engineer tappy? Once you know how it works, I just assumed that Huawei has more than enough engineering talent to put together a tappy.
3. Was there a particular component of tappy that was hard to copy?
4. If I had to guess, the software that recognizes if the phone screen is on and working is the secret sauce. Not the mechanical tapping which, although sophisticated, is presumably copyable.
PM: "Why aren't we done yet?"
Dev: "Umm, we need more photos."
{Cue never ending stream of request for photos}
There was glare, all kinds of distortion, noise etc, that while of course possible to overcome, was way out of my league to deal with. I guess one could have thrown machine learning in the mix too... :-P
Sometimes 'seeing' a piece or component can reveal a lot as it represents the solution to a problem that is not otherwise evident.
The smallest details like the size/type of motors, power ratings, how they are positioned, what kinds of sensors they use can reveal a lot.
To boot, you're not dealing with a toy that can fall apart after 10 uses - this is gear that ostensibly has to be fairly robust, which introduces a whole other set of quality challenges beyond 'just making it work'.
Example: making a little 'toy car' that ran across the floor, we ran into all sorts of control issues with the motors as the car encountered surfaces of different types, and also issues with getting caught on carpet etc.. Upon seeing how our partners made a previous device, it became pretty clear how they solved the problem. Instead of testing various different configurations and trying to find the 'best fit' - we just used their example.
What is different now and why wasn’t it a bigger deal before?
Also note that this story doesn't cover the other charges of wire fraud brought against them.
https://litigation.findlaw.com/filing-a-lawsuit/civil-cases-...
Now, a very cynical idea is that T-Mobile figured Tappy wasn't expensive to replicate regardless, so the maximum profit lay in indulging Huawei's decision to commit a trade secrets violation. That would explain giving Huawei continued access while refusing to answer questions and installing good-faith safeguards in the lab. There's some circumstantial evidence which could back this: T-Mobile apparently considered licensing out Tappy, which is what started the lab-access program at issue here. And TMO did sue Huawei for "reasonable royalties" on Tappy plus double that in punitive damages, though all they got were breach of contract damages. If they suspected that Huawei wouldn't buy an expensive license and could replicate Tappy without espionage cheaply, then a shot at triple royalties might have sounded like a winning outcome.
I don't believe that's true here. It'd require probably-illegal coordination to get T-Mobile staff on the same page, all in the interest of fighting a lengthy trial to maybe receive damages which would be tough to sustain on appeal and collect. But laches defenses exist for a reason, and a strategic delay to collect larger damages is at least an interesting possibility to consider.
I can hear the theme music.
A simple XYZ platform driven by steppers would probably be far easier and more reliable/reproducible. Throw some OpenCV in with feature tracking and a database of phone screenshots and some shitty internal web app and...lol
As someone mentioned upthread, it could just be company culture around how they value stolen trade secrets vs internally developed know-how. Sort of like, once upon a time, "nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM."
If you work in a company that has standard cultural practices of stealing things, then you have to not do it. Of course many companies try to be aggressive and push the illegal envelope (like say Uber) but you have to be moral and honest, it's a crucial aspect of the professionalism that we should have. That's a difficult line that I feel fortunate never to have faced in my software engineering career. Think about those engineers and leaders at VW who lied about the 'defeat device'. I would guess they were in some kind of automotive or mechanical or other professional organization that had a code of ethics that you couldn't do those things.
Ultimately the real trouble probably isn't the actual arm or gantry but all the software around it to determine what's on the screen and if the phone is functioning properly with respect to the expected test results and the response times which seems what they were interested in. Maybe that's just my bias though and there may be some major hurdles with the function of the fingertip.