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Keynote: The role of cloud and open source software in the future of robotics

Roger Barga

C l o u d R o b o t i c s S u m m i t

General Manager

AWS Robotics

Brian Gerkey

CEO, Founder

Open Robotics

Trends to track Role of cloud infuture of robotics

What defines a robot?

A robot is an autonomous machine that is capable of sensing its

environment, that performs computations to make decisions, and

that performs actions in the real world.

ComputeSense Act

Three distinct types of robots

Drones Robotic arms Ground mobility

Mobile robotics

We are at an inflection point.

Expected growth in the use of mobile robots will increase by almost tenfold over the next two to three years.

333%

798%

Mobile robotics

Source: IDTechEx

By 2030

70% of all mobile material handling equipment willbe autonomous

By 2023

It’s estimated that mobile autonomous robots will emerge as the standard for logistic and fulfillment processes

The pull of economics

Sources: Economist Intelligence Unit; IMB; Institut fur Arbeitsmarkt und Berufsforschung; Int’l Robot Federation; US Social Security Data; McKinsey analysis

220

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

Labor costs

Robot prices

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010

Top reasons for deploying Q. Please rank the top 5 reasons for deploying or planning to deploy

commercial service robots in your organization. N=550

Source: Commercial Service Robotics Survey IDC, July 2018

50.4

44.4

40.4

39.3

36.9

33.5

33.1

32.2

31.1

28.2

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

3PLs

eCommerce/Retailers

Who’s using mobile robots?

Other opportunities for mobile robots

Today just ~2% of mobile robots are automated

Robot platform

Fork trucks Tuggers

Pallet movers

Cross-dock

Pallet conveying

Unit load moves

Shipping/receiving

Replenishment

Process

The future of mobile robots in logistics

Past Present Future?

Takeaways

Economics is a significant driver.1

Improve worker productivity, offer customersnew services, and increase operational capacity.2

There’s consumer demand for new experiences.3

Trends to track Role of cloud infuture of robotics

AWS RoboMaker

Simulation Cloud extensions

for robotsFleet

management

72 sensors

Low-end CPU

Cloud extensions

Customer story

Customer story

Need

• Voice interface

• Real-time monitoring

• Live video streaming

Challenges

• Little expertise

• Limited local compute power

• Limited engineering resources

Solution

• AWS RoboMaker cloud extensions

Amazon Lex

Amazon Kinesis Video

Streams

Amazon Rekognition

Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon Polly

Implementation

RobotCloud Extensions

Machine learning

Fleet management Diagnostics and logging

Over-the-air updates

Sockets

server

Real-time data

AWS

RoboMaker

ROS

AWS

Lambda

Amazon

S3

Amazon

CloudWatch

Amazon

Lex

Amazon

Polly

Amazon

Rekognition

AWS IoT

Greengrass

Customer success

Results

• Built voice interface within hours

• Built live monitoring and alerting within days

• Built live video streaming within days

“It was a revelation seeing how easily cloud

connectivity could be accomplished with

[AWS] RoboMaker. We immediately realized

that we could use [AWS] RoboMaker to take

the next release of Lea to a higher level.”

Gabriel LopesControl and Robotics Scientist, Robot Care System

AWS RoboMakersimulation

Zero infrastructure toprovision, configure,or manage

Run multiplesimulations in parallel

Auto-scale based onsimulation complexity

Pay-as-you-go

Customer story

Need

• Test coverage for different floor layouts

• Test coverage for different scenarios, such as robot kidnap

• Improve code release speed

• Challenges

Challenges

• Costly and time consuming to test

• Limited test cases and coverage

• Late bug discovery

Solution

• Large-scale and automated testing using AWS RoboMaker simulation

Implementation

Customer success

Results

• 40 automated tests on each code commit

• 500 automated tests for each release candidate

• Much faster testing and release cycle(e.g., 1 hour versus 3 weeks for testing 70 robot kidnap scenarios)

AWSDeepRacer

Reinforcement Learning for AWS DeepRacer

Successful simulation to real transfer

Role of the cloud in the future of robotics

Intelligent cloud services can enhance local processing on the robot and can improve performance over time.1

Simulation can be used to test application correctness, and ensure performance across a range of conditions. 2

Simulation, combined with imitation and reinforcement learning, can be used to program robot actuation. 3

Robot software is hard

software

environment

sensorsactuators

Develop and test in simulation

Deploy the same code to hardware

ROS

Robotics SDK

tools ecosystemcapabilitiesplumbing

Technical Steering Committee

ROS 2

Goals

• Quality of design and implementation

• Validation, verification,and certification

• System reliability

• Flexibility in communication

• Real-time control and deterministic execution

• Support for smallembedded systems

Latest release

Foxy Fitzroy—June 2020EOL—May 2023

Focus for 2020 Q3-Q4: Product readiness

Make ROS 2 more suitable for use

in production scenarios

Improve the out-of-box experience

for common use cases

Improve documentation

Address disparities between ROS 1 and ROS 2

ROS 2 status & roadmap

Gazebo

Simulation as the best possible substitute for physical robots

GUISensors

Interfaces Cloud

Physics

Ignition

Simulation libraries for reuse in other applications

ign-guiign-sensors

ign-rendering

ign-transport

ign-msgsign-fuel

ign-physics

ign-math

Ignition/Gazebo status & roadmap

Latest release

Citadel—December 2020EOL—December 2024

Focus for 2020 Q3-Q4: Close the gap

Reduce feature disparity between

older and newer releases

Facilitate migration to new release

Improve documentation release

process and usability

Fully support Windows, Ubuntu, and macOS

Use case: Humanoid supervised autonomy

Use case: Multi-robot search and rescue

Use case: Agile factory automation

Simulation bottleneck:world authoring

Even with good tools and excellent artists, never enough hand-crafted worlds

Need automation to create massive sets of environments for testing

World forge launch video