Pretty sweet! Don’t have the time (or budget) to directly invest in the hardware but do you have a list of open source “open” software problems you are looking to solve?
We haven't updated it much but it's a good starter point
a) some of these definitely look they could be done without hardware or with light hardware support from a staff member?
b) if you do a) and are open source completely I bet you don’t even need to do bounties. The increased participation could mean some great community generated solutions quick.
But on the long-tail of autonomy options? Implementing the latest papers, trying cutting edge solutions, I bet a thriving open-source community could be very helpful ala PR2, given that the hardware is already open-source.
Nothing stopping you from picking and choosing from the various implementations to build into a streamlined product offering on the front end.
I basically think our goal is to solve all the boring stuff and make it work reliably, so that other can people can try out the cool ML stuff more easily