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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

George Hotz says: "we developed a proper successor to ROS. openpilot has serialization (with capnp) and IPC (with zmq + a custom zero copy msgq). It uses a constellation of processes to coordinate to drive a car."[1] And Comma sells a robot that runs Openpilot: https://comma.ai/shop/body

> You can't do actual robotics stuff with it, like drive actuators to control limbs or grippers, do motion control or SLAM or perception or any of the usual robotics stack.

A lot of the "usual robotics stack" is not going to be relevant for the new wave of consumer robotics that is coming soon. It will be enabled by end-to-end machine learning and stuff like traditional SLAM methods will not be a part of that. The Bitter Lesson[2] is coming for robotics.

[1] https://x.com/__tinygrad__/status/1834792473081815259

[2] For those unfamiliar: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

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I enjoy Hotz as a hacker, but I'm really allergic to this kind of oversold language. "[W]e developed a proper successor to ROS" is a past tense statement, as if they've already done this thing. In reality, at best they have presented a roadmap for a thing that could approximate ROS one day.

In the robotics community, the stuff coming out of George Hotz has always been considered a kludgy mess, and unsuitable for serious work. Dude is a talented hacker, but the idea that this will replace ROS is kind of a joke.

To be fair, even ROS I would consider a hobby one.

The point of the bitter lesson is "leverage compute as best you can" not "use DNNs everywhere just because". Oftentimes your available compute is still a crappy ARM machine with no real parallel compute where the best DNN you can run is still not large nor fast enough to even be viable, much less a good fit.

And well some classical algorithms like A* are mathematically optimal. You literally cannot train a more efficient DNN if your problem needs grid search. It will just waste more compute for the same result.

Besides, the nav stack is not really the point of ROS. It's the standardization. Standard IPC, types, messages, package building, deployment, etc. Interoperability where you can grab literally any sensor or actuator known to man and a driver will already exist and output/require the data in the exact format you need/have, standard visualizers and controllers to plug into the mix and debug. This is something we'll need as long as new hardware keeps getting built even if the rest of your process is end to end. It doesn't have to be the best, it just needs to work and it needs to be widely used for the concept to make sense.

The future of consumer robotics will not be built on "a crappy ARM machine with no real parallel compute". Traditional robotics has failed to produce machines that can operate in the real world outside of strictly controlled environments, and more of the same isn't going to change that. Fast hardware for running DNNs will be a hard requirement for useful general purpose robots.

I agree that it'll be needed, but that hardware that can provide enough compute at acceptable wattage is yet to materialize. Only once that changes the equation will change. Today you'd be surprised how many production UGVs run off an actual Pi 4 or something in a comparable compute ballpark.

With due respect, this has to be one of the most ignorant takes on robotics I have read in a while. Yes, you can always slap serialization and ZMQ on your framework. That doesn't make it an OS.

And no, the usual robotics stack is not going away anytime soon. Maybe develop some actual useful robots before posting like an expert on robotics topics.

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