You’ve seen the dancing Boston Dynamics dogs, Honda’s ASIMO greeting people at malls, and the half-court-shooting robot at the Olympics, among other awe-inspiring robot stories that nowadays are getting increasingly more common. But equally fascinating, especially for us programmers, is the amount of programming and structure needed to make sure these robots work as intended. In this episode, we talk with Abhay Venkatesh, Software Engineer at Anduril Industries, about Platforms for Robotics (PFRs), and the intricacies happening inside these mechanical wonders.

This episode touches on the following key topics and ideas:

00:00:24 Introduction

00:01:10 Introducing Abhay Venkatesh

00:03:00 What robotics is as a field or practice

00:07:18 Platform for Robotics (PFRs)

00:10:07 OODA loop

00:12:27 What makes up a Platform for Robotics?

00:14:17 Raspberry Pi 

00:15:30 Nvidia Tegra

00:17:17 Edge computing

00:19:29 Telemetry

00:22:06 Ad: SignalWire, a next-gen video collaboration platform

00:23:30 Real-time constraints and safety challenges

00:28:31 Formal verification and defensive programming

00:32:28 Operating systems in robotics

00:34:27 Nix and reproducible hermetic builds

00:37:52 Key aspects in robotics software development

00:41:14 Deployment

00:46:24 Simulation

00:48:51 Google testing pyramid 

00:52:01 Actuators

00:55:27 Future of PFRs

01:02:49 Farewells

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Companies

• Anduril Industries https://www.anduril.com/
• Nvidia https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/
• Boston Dynamics https://www.bostondynamics.com/

Tools

• Arduino https://www.arduino.cc/
• Raspberry Pi https://www.raspberrypi.org/
• Nvidia Tegra https://developer.nvidia.com/tegra-development
• NixOS https://nixos.org/
• Docker https://www.docker.com/
• Bazel https://bazel.build/

Our sponsor for this episode is SignalWire

https://signalwire.com/

Use code THROWDOWN for $25 in developer credit

Abhay’s website: https://abhayvenkatesh.com/

Abhay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhayVenkatesh1

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