Five Learnings from 15 Years in Perception
tangramvision.com
tangramvision.com
For example they suggest ROS as a robust industry-ready software, which absolutely hasn't been my experience: you hire a bunch of domain experts to solve the various [hardware, controls, perception, imaging, systems] problems, but once you use ROS as your middleware you end up needing a bunch of ROS experts instead. This is due to the horrible build system, odd choice of defaults, instability under constrained resources, and how it inserts itself into everything. You end up needing more fine-grained control than ROS gives you to make an actually robust system, but by the time you discover this you'll be so invested into ROS that switching away will involve a full rewrite.
The same goes for further downstream: OpenCV images are basically a void* with a bunch of helper functions. (4.x tried to help with this but got sideswiped by DNN before anything concrete could happen.)
I guess it's the same rant the FreeBSD people have about the Linux ecosystem and its reliability. However I'd hope we raise our standards when it comes to mobile robotics that have the potential to accidentally seriously hurt people. And who knows, maybe one day OpenCV and ROS will pleasantly surprise me the way Linux has with its progress.
So true. The worst is that at many companies they will write a ROS clone in the end that does what they need, instead of getting rid of this awful programming paradigm altogether.
With regards to startups in general though. Having worked at a few Ive noticed that at the earliest stages the goal is for a few individuals to build quickly. Often this means certain framework choices that may not be suitable to scaling. As one scales one has to then evolve the architecture to ensure developer velocoty. This may mean rewriting everything. Im not surprised that people are rewriting ROS internally. At the end of the day there are a few good ideas in there, but at some point one has to acknowledge that implementations were lacking.
Personally if one were to write a middleware framework in 2024 Id go with rust, mcap, zenoh, rerun and possibly use ecs instead of topics.
The problem is the primary ROS contributor was/is a hybrid robotics engineer + software developer, which meant their colleagues were more likely of "closed, vendor firmware toolchains are normal" et al. norms, which meant their community hadn't internalized a lot of those solutions.
And this isn't to bash different types of devs -- god knows even leading edge software practices have all kinds of gaps -- but is to say that few people can be 100% in multiple hard things, all at once.
- We have moved to standard sockets IPC, or protocol buffers. - For logging just trivial printing. - For configuration to libconfig - For launch system to simple shell scripts.
I despise the framework approach, it ossifies bad decisions and then it becomes a monumental task to move away from the framework, because now you need to replace everything.
Also BY FAR not my experience.
Personally I see ROS as a cool thing for prototyping and research, but I see it certainly not as a serious solution for industry.
> This is due to the horrible build system, odd choice of defaults, instability under constrained resources, and how it inserts itself into everything.
This is an excellent short description of the main pain topics. I would add, that the need to work with 5 different languages (YAML, XML, MSG, CMAKE and C and/or Python) from scratch, makes it difficult for SME that are not software people to be productive in short time.
Another phrase I see spreading rapidly is "double-click that" replacing "drill into that". Seems like every podcast instantly adopted "double-click" lingo in the last 2 years.
Because if you're not using the newest lingo, you might not be using the newest approaches, and might be falling behind! (gasp!)
In my corporate experience, the main thing about lessons was whether they were 'identified' or actually 'learned', e.g. following a corporate post-mortem of some cockup/fiasco/disaster.
...until a few years ago when:
> Computer vision has been consumed by AI.
...but "AI" is an unsatisfying reduction. What does it even mean? (and c'mon, plenty of non-NN CV techniques going back decades can be called "AI" today with a straight-face (for example, an adaptive pixel+contour histogram model for classifying very specific things).
My point is that computer-vision, as a field, *is* (an) artificial-intelligence: it has not been "consumed by AI". I don't want ephemeral fad terminology (y'know... buzzwords) getting in the way of what could have been a much better article.
A lot of our visual perception happens on the retina and in the 'processing pipeline' before reaching the brain.
Margaret Livingstone provides an excellent overview in her book "Vision and Art" and she takes a view similar to yours.
Today the word "AI" has itself been hijacked by marketers of ANN-based techniques, so when the article uses that term, it confuses people who don't know any better.
The benefits of all this spy tech are great - if we manage it right. I mean telephone tapping is an example
Example: "I have made this technology that makes me (and only me) earn 1 cent per day when managed right. Bad actors can use it to hack into hospitals and ransom them".
Wouldn't you agree that this hypothetical technology is probably not worth it?
In my opinion, it's not acceptable to say "I created a technology that helps bad guys be even worse, but I don't have any responsibility at all because I don't personally ask them to be bad guys".
Of course sometimes it's harder than one may think a posteriori: sometimes it was not clear while developping the technology that it would have bad applications.
Ethics is that incentive.
Would you be fine getting a good salary for legally building bombs that are sold legally, knowing that they are purposely killing many innocent children? If the answer is "no", then it means that there is an incentive. You "just" need to find your line.
And I strongly believe that sometimes, the only way is to agree together on a line (through regulations), because individually we may not be strong enough. For instance I think that sending people to the ISS/Moon/Mars is an artistic performance that the world does not need. On the contrary, we invest a ton of public money into doing that, which then unlocks private companies (like SpaceX) to commoditize space, which in turn is bad for the environment. So I would vote against spending public money on this. But now if you offered me to become an astronaut in a space program, I would most definitely go. I find it interesting: I would vote against it, but given the opportunity I would do it :-).
We like having dash-cams because they make other peoples bad driving clear to the judge / insurance agent. Something like that for all aspects of your life seems good and that’s just the personal point. Once we start looking at how to aggregate medical data and provide it to researchers - I mean some doctor has come up with stick on Bluetooth ECG monitors - stick on and record for 48 hours.
The problems arise when the data is used unfairly. Look this guys is (social underdog) - we can use the recorded data to prosecute him. That only gets solved when the judges recorded data shows a clear bias … and we live in a fair open democratic society
If we don’t live in such a society then yea, this technology will Almost always have more cost than benefit - but that’s not the technology.
I don't reach the same conclusion when I look at all the documented privacy abuse that is happening, though.