<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat a lot of people tell me is \u2018hardware is hard,\u2019\u201d Eliot Horowitz explains. \u201cI have a really big problem with that statement.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Viam Robotics CEO and MongoDB co-founder describes purchasing a Universal Robotics\u2019 UR5 robot arm and programming it to play chess. \u201cI don\u2019t think hardware is hard. I think hardware is not that hard. But if I asked my hardware designer to go build a thing, in three months, it will work.\u201d<\/p>\n
The New York-based startup\u2019s approach to the subject is that software is where things start to breakdown, and for lack of a better term, turn hard. Viam\u2019s certainly not alone in this thought process, and the last few years have seen a big uptick in firms hoping to solve the robot software problem. Notable among them are names like Instrinsic, the Alphabet X offshoot looking to create a kind of universal software layer for industrial systems.<\/p>\n
Fittingly, Viam\u2019s space is littered with\u00a0 hardware. It\u2019s a large office, with an unbeatable bird\u2019s eye view of Lincoln Center. Corners and cubicles house all manner of different robotics projects in various stages of disarray.<\/p>\n
Image Credits:<\/strong> Viam Robotics<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Today, the company is announcing the release of a public beta of its robotics platform. It\u2019s an effort to make a sort of one-stop, cloud-based repository for the sorts of tools required to prototype, code, deploy and scale systems. And like some of the competitors that have sprung up in recent years, Viam developed its system with a kind of hardware agnosticism in mind.<\/p>\n But unlike many firms that have focused on a low- or no-code solution designed for non-programmers\/roboticists, Horowitz argues that the industry simply isn\u2019t there. He points to a web design software analogy.<\/p>\n \u201cDreamweaver was, in some ways, ahead of its time. If you look at Webflow or Squarespace, they\u2019re kind of doing what Dreamweaver was doing, but Dreamweaver came out at a time when the backends weren\u2019t ready for a product of its nature. It was really just a product ahead of its time. The e-commerce space wasn\u2019t ready for no-code. I think robotics is in the same place. The benefit of a low-code solution, if it worked, would be great. I just think it\u2019s impractical.\u201d<\/p>\n Horowitz adds that, in his vision, Viam\u2019s software replaces the Robotic Operating System in mainstream, non-academic usage. \u201cROS was designed for academic research, and it\u2019s good for academic research. It\u2019s not a great production system. It\u2019s not great for people who want to get started quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n The beta version of the service is currently being offered for free. It promises hardware agnostic cloud-based robotics tools, developer APIs and enterprise security. On general availability, the company will offer \u201cconsumption-based pricing\u201d for the service. The beta arrives some eight months after Viam\u2019s $30 million Series A, which itself followed $12 million in seed funding the year prior.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhat a lot of people tell me is \u2018hardware is hard,\u2019\u201d Eliot Horowitz explains. \u201cI have a really big problem with that statement.\u201d The Viam Robotics CEO and MongoDB co-founder describes purchasing a Universal Robotics\u2019 UR5 robot arm and programming it to play chess. \u201cI don\u2019t think hardware is hard. I think hardware is not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1221380,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1221378","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221378","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1221378"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1221378\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1221378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1221378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1221378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}