Programming Throwdown
Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci
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
Use code THROWDOWN for $25 in developer credit
Abhay’s website: https://abhayvenkatesh.com/
Abhay on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AbhayVenkatesh1
If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/
Reach out to us via email: programmingthrowdown@gmail.com
You can also follow Programming Throwdown on
Join the discussion on our Discord
Help support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon