I deduced Mercury must have gone retrograde from the progress of this robot project.
At the beginning of it, I started an article that said “the arm was only $140.”
Then I had to change that to under $300.
I am now at under $700, and thinking about scrapping that article entirely.
If anyone ever tells you robotics is easy, give them the stink-eye.
ROS is a beast.
I’ve asked all the top-shelf AIs the same question, and they all say basically the same thing: the VLA models are very capable, but don’t expect them to map and navigate your house.
Of course, better models are coming out all the time, so I’m not even totally sure what information the LLMs are basing that on. And these companies like physical intelligence are talking long arc autonomous actions.
But the AI approach to robotics feels so much more straightforward than ROS that I have been desperate to find a workaround.
But it seems like the choice is this: either I stop aiming for the task I’m currently aiming for – which is picking up toys off the floor and putting them away – and train it for something else, or I learn ROS.
The flip side of ROS is that it’s freaking incredible.
Give it the right sensors and it’ll map your room, navigate to waypoints while avoiding obstacles, and will eventually, finally trigger a VLA policy.
So remember back in January when I was all excited to try Pi0.5?
Well, instead of just doing that, I decided to do this big complicated thing first.
I’ve said out loud a dozen times now, “the last part to finish the robot is in the mail.”
But this time, I really think the last part to finish the robot is in the mail.
We’ll see.
I finally broke down and bought an OAK-D Lite depth camera after eventually accepting that $5 ultrasonic depth sensors were not going to do the trick.
But the Raspberry Pi is being fussy about the amount of power it thinks is available from the battery setup, so it’s refusing to deliver adequate power to the OAK-D. Which means I now need a special OAK-D adapter that splits data and power from separate sources.
Last part. Fingers crossed.