Viam: Modern robotics platform | Hacker News Reader

Viam: Modern robotics platform

viam.com

43 pointszmk513 comments

This is a little unrelated but I much prefer the style of illustrations and decorations in this website (and others that are similar) than the deformed and purple coloured people from Alegria or whatever it was called.

Corporate Memphis

I found that design to be refreshing as well, with the black “highlights” and the isometric 3D. Though if everyone would start using that design, it’d quickly get annoying as well, I guess.

I skimmed a bit, are my evaluations correct?

- The robot/hardware should provide a TCP stack

- The firmware running on robot should be written in a way to work against viam sdk (which necessitates having a high-level OS like Linux running on it)

- Viam is like LabView/Simulink or ROS as-a-web-service

Congrats on launching, btw

You forgot:

- The firmware running on the robot should have internet access

Seems like they're very focused on teleoperation or fleet operations as a use case so this makes sense.

Internet access is optional, or can be intermittent.

If you use the cloud service (consumption based & optional) then you'll need internet access for configuration, logging, etc... But if you lose connectivity, the robot will operate just fine until the TLS cert expires (always at least 30 days in the future). Configs are cached locally so even a full robot reboot without internet access will work fine.

We think teleoperation is important as making perfect fully autonomous robots is incredibly hard, and by having humans in the loop, we can achieve much more tangible progress on real world problems.

Honestly, as someone who has been building robots full time for 7 years, I am struggling to guess which real world application use cases you are modeling your system design assumptions on and which alternative system architectures you believe you are delivering increased value against. Why don't you just describe them? It would be so much easier for people to grok what you're doing. The use cases section of your website lists is too meta to be useful. (PS. 'Modern' is not something people care for in most industrial use cases. In fact, they generally prefer 'reliable', 'well understood', 'cheap' or some combination thereof. You may wish to reconsider your marketing strategy.)

I see there is a lot on Github but I'm a bit unsure how much is actually Open Source. I like the idea of a managed cloud but I'd be concerned to use one in production. Not saying this would happen here but too many companies have gone out of business and bricked IoT devices in the process. A cloud provider has the unique ability to brick many devices from different vendors.

Can I run the server on my own cloud?

The whole system is built on gRPC, and everything is open source aside from our cloud app itself. So yes, you can run your own server, you can have multiple robots talking to one another, etc, all on your own network with no outside communication whatsoever.

All open source code is here: https://github.com/viamrobotics

The pinned `rdk` repo is the primary codebase.

How is state managed? Or is this a low level library where you control everything directly?

We changed the URL from https://www.viam.com/ to the page that seems to give more of an intro to what this is.

Thank you!

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