本文和视频是TechXchanges：ROS: Robot Operating System和科学与工程女性（明智）, as well as the然后现在图书馆系列。you也可以查看更多TechXchange Talks视频。
Building robots isn't an easy task. One of the platforms that makes the job easier is theRobot Operating System (ROS)。Open Roboticssupports ROS as well as凉亭, a robot simulation environment.
我与Open Robotics的Open Robotics的凯瑟琳·斯科特（Katherine Scott）进行了交谈，Open Robotics的开发人员倡导者，ROS及其在机器人领域的工作以及她多年来所看到的发展。
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Transcript
Wong:机器人很有趣，他们已经持续了一段时间。
Katherine, you've actually been working with robots for probably almost your whole career. Could you tell us when you started working with robots?
斯科特：Well, so I started working with robots in probably about 2001 when I started undergrad. And it's been kind of an off and on thing all the way through.
我倾向于专注于计算机视觉，但始终会导致使用机器人。我从三年前开始开放的机器人技术开始，但是我从一开始就认识了它们。我对柳树车库的很多人很友好，您知道，Ros，凉亭或Ros and Opencv的原始创作者。
几年前，他们有点接近我，说：“嘿，您有兴趣在这里工作吗？”我想，“哎呀，是的。”
So I live in San Francisco, and I've never been really interested in working in the South Bay and Silicon Valley. I said the only place I'd ever work at in Silicon Valley is Open Robotics. They finally came and said they want me to work in Open Robotics and we'll let you stay in San Francisco. That works for me. I'm sold. Excellent!
Wong:好吧，您能告诉我们一些机器人技术领域以来的发展如何？您看到了什么样的东西。
斯科特：好吧，它发生了很大变化。正确的。从2000年初开始，它发生了变化。如果您考虑一下，它很大。八十年代和九十年代有一个大波浪。一个非常非常具体的，非常非常非常有条理的机器人，确实喜欢一件事。他们做了一件事。他们做得很快。他们做得很好。他们花了很多钱。他们花了一段时间安装。 You had a lot of subject matter expertise to do it.
That was the situation for a very long time and what we've seen, particularly in the past, I don't know, let's say five to six years, is that things have changed a lot. Robots have gotten cheaper. They've gotten easier to use and they've gotten way more adaptable to like real-world situations.
因此，例如，您已经从八十年代和九十年代的那种例子中走了，或者（您正在）建造汽车，您得到了一个机器人，它在一个盒子里捡起东西，这是固定的。这是一个非常具体的方向。它不会移动。它捡起它。将其移开。将其放在非常特殊的位置上。您知道，它拧入五个螺栓，您就完成了。
我们已经从类似于AMR (autonomous mobile robot) where you give the robot very general instructions like, I need you to take this thing from point A to B in your warehouse and the robot goes through this environment.
它没有固定。它可以处理发生的事情。我可以与一个在盒子前行走的人打交道，落在必须走来走去的地面上。它具有灵活性，灵活性使许多新应用程序和新域。
其他例子将是农业。农业的机器人除了像装配线一样，并不是什么。我们有这条机器人装配线，您将一堆苹果扔在上面。也许，如果幸运的话，它可能会摆脱不良的苹果。现在，我们正在寻找在现场外出的机器人，我们开始看到人们试图将机器人送去挑选苹果并将其放在盒子里。然后，另一个机器人将该盒子带到其他地方，然后被洗净，然后将其送到市场和东西。
因此，更多的灵活性和很多便宜。
Wong:There are a lot of things that have been changing even in the past 10 or 20 years, but what do you think are the one or two most impactful things that have happened in robotics?
斯科特：有影响力？
you have the increase in compute. Computers have gotten faster. They do more things in parallel and that increase in presentation and speed has enabled people to do much more complex things. We found all these new computer vision things that that enabled that.
当我从2000年初开始职业生涯时，这确实非常困难。就像未解决的问题一样，我有一个房间，我有相机。我基本上希望能够构建该房间的3D型号。那不是1999年可能的事情。
现在，我们已经到达了您可以进入一个带相机的房间，并构建3D型号。机器人可以理解其所在的空间。
然后，有了一些深入学习的东西，我有了空间。我知道空间是什么样的，我知道空间中的东西，我可以找到不同的东西。
我认为另一个很大的变化是模拟的大量利用，该模拟在某种程度上已经存在了一段时间，但是机器人很难使用。如果您是软件开发人员，也许您会编写一堆代码。按编译，事物可以工作或行不通。您写一堆，修复它，一遍又一遍地做到这一点。您很快就能完成工作。
使用机器人，这很难，因为您必须将代码加载到机器人上。运行机器人来做事情。检查它是否做了事情，做了正确的操作，然后重试。
So when you use a simulator, run a virtual robot on your computer, you can close that loop a lot faster, but you can also, in theory, run ten different robots at the same time to see if it really works.
It's kind of like an imagination for robots, like they can see it in their head. You can see if something's going to work before you actually do it.
因此，我认为那种双重事物，例如更高级的感知，可以弄清楚房间，弄清楚东西，能够绘制房间，然后有能力有智力的目光来弄清楚您要在哪里以及要做什么在您要这样做之前，它是否可以正常工作。
这些可能是最大的。
There's some hardware innovation and stuff, too. Everything's just gotten better and cheaper.
Wong:Okay. So what are you doing now at Open Robotics? And what did you do when you started?
斯科特：I do a lot of the sort of community outreach work. I keep the websites going. I keep our forums going. That sort of thing.
Open Robotics, broadly speaking at this point, has not changed that much. We're pretty consistent.
实际上，我只是在和某人谈论这个。有点多样化。因此，我们从这些大型机器人竞赛中完成了所有帮助。我们为他们建立了模拟。我们建立了类似的基础设施来进行模拟器或进行比赛。我们也做其他事情。
我们制作ROS，机器人操作系统和凉亭。人们有时会来找我们说，我真的很喜欢这个功能，否则我真的很希望您能帮助我们建造机器人的这一部分。
您是专家，建造了它，您是其中的专家。我们可以得到您的帮助吗？
We do smaller contracts sort of things where cool startups come in and they say: Hey, we're working on this thing. You guys are kind of experts. You've seen a lot of these. Can you do like a design review for us?
因此，我们将向您展示机器人。我们会让大家戳戳该代码，您就可以提出有关如何改善自己的工作的建议。那真的很有趣。
We have other clients. We do some robot installations here and there. I can't necessarily talk about all of them, but we do larger sort of robot deployments. We've actually been working on this system lately.
因此，最近发生了什么变化的事情之一是，除了工厂以外，您还会有一个或两个机器人做非常无聊的事情。
例如，我有一个机器人拖把和一个机器人真空。许多其他组织，例如医院，可能都有清洁机器人，灭菌机器人，Gofer机器人和食品送货机器人。因此，您拥有所有这些不同的机器人，所有这些不同的舰队，例如一堆相同的机器人，它们都必须一起工作。
They come from different vendors. They work in different ways and people needed some orchestration software to basically keep the robots from like running into each other. It makes it easy to deploy them. It makes it easy for them to work in the environment.
Say you're in a hospital and there's an elevator. The robot needs to be able to go up and down the elevator. Well, how do you make that happen?
这就像一个未解决的问题，另一个是您拥有这八种不同类型的机器人，然后将它们放在走廊上，他们只是做他们想做的一切，对吗？
他们要堵塞走廊。人们会生气。因此，您必须告诉他们仅在街道的这一侧。您屈服于这个机器人，该机器人屈服于该机器人，它们都屈服于人民和类似的东西。一旦拥有一堆不同的机器人，就可以解决所有遇到的类似问题。
Wong:出色的。Well, you mentioned ROS and Gazebo before. Could you tell us what those are?
斯科特：Okay. So ROS stands for Robot Operating System.
Which is it? It's a misnomer because it's not an operating system, but it is also kind of an operating system.
实际上，归根结底，它是所有构建机器人所需的所有算法和基础架构和工具的集合。
So you have all these different parts in a robot. You have the cameras and the LIDARs and if you have the mobile base with wheels on the ground. You might have an arm somewhere that has to move around.
It's the glue code that has to move all the communication between them. There's primitives for building basically a program that ties all that together. There's primitives for building those primitive or just primitives for building that integration between the components. There is visualization tools and logging tools. People build packages that make it easy to deploy machine-learning models on your robot.
It's all of those sorts of bits and pieces. So it's a toolbox, really. You take all the tools and bolt them all together and you build a robot.
凉亭是一个模拟器。确实，当天结束时，它就像是一个非常非常适合机器人的视频游戏，当我说电子游戏时，我的意思是您可以用物理学来可视化，然后您可以放一个假机器人在该视频游戏中，并以现实的方式运行机器人软件，看看会发生什么。
We have simulations of warehouse environments where the robots are going around moving boxes and stuff and so you pick up the boxes, they have weight, they have like weight distributed in different spots.
您必须以非常特定的方式捡起它们，灯光可能会熄灭，否则地板可能会在斑点上变滑。您可以模拟所有这些不同的部分，并查看机器人的行为。
Wong:So what are the hot research areas now?
斯科特：热研究领域？总是有深入的事情的一面，因为就像我说的那样，事物的感知方面已经推动了一段时间。
因此，最初是，我们可以构建地图吗？我们如何构建地图？该地图是什么样的？我们可以识别事物吗？我们可以认识多少件事？我们如何认识他们？
现在有很多的工作在这个过程asier and more robust. There's crazy, crazy stuff going on right now. It's like I take a picture of something and then I can basically build a 3D reconstruction of it which is really an important problem to solve. So that's important.
In robotics there's the so-called the sim-to-real problem. You have the simulation, you have the real world, and they don't match perfectly. Like the world's a complex simulation. It's kind of simple and how do we build stuff in simulation such that we know that when it works in the simulation it's going to work perfectly in the real world.
一组问题（例如使整个事情都很容易运行）很重要。否则，在机器人技术中，通常也只有控制领域。
So when I was an undergrad. I actually worked in legged robotics. It wasn't quite the Boston Dynamic robot, but very similar, sort of like six-legged robot. That was very, very researchy.
您只是想让它起作用，现在您开始看到人们建立真正的人。
哦，在楼下。所以我有一个玩具坐在这里。因此，这都是控制理论，因此使这些动作发生了，尤其是在诸如捡拾东西之类的东西中，我们忽略了捡起东西的真正困难。
人类真的很擅长，这是很难教一台机器来捡起东西的事情之一。
因此，这些领域现在正在积极研究。
ROS总体上很酷的是，很酷的是，我们可以看到像研究生一样的学生建立一些东西，然后有人会采用最初的工作代码内核，并在其上进行迭代并修复并清洁它向上努力，对其进行努力，并在它上进行工作。
It provides this sort of pipeline to move that thing from the academic world where it's not necessarily perfect. It just kind of works to getting it all the way up to the point where it works for something like a business and that's the really cool part of our job is that we get to see that whole process of going from research and development, like academic stuff, to putting stuff out there in the real world at scale, and it's really satisfying to see that whole process happen.
Wong:出色的。好吧，感谢您在开放机器人技术和过去几年的情况下填补我们的工作以及您的工作。这真的很有趣。
斯科特：you're welcome.
