The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Pioneering open source drones and robocars (Interview)

Episode Date: October 18, 2019

Chris Anderson, former Editor-in-Chief of WIRED and a true pioneer in the world of drones, joined the show to talk about his hobby gone wrong, how he started 3D Robotics, DIY Drones, and Dronecode. We also talked about his newest passion, DIY Robocars.

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On today's show, we're talking with Chris Anderson, former Editor-in-Chief of Wired and a true pioneer in the world of drones. We talked with Chris about his hobby gone wrong, how he started 3D robotics, DIY drones, and drone code. And we also talked to him about his newest passion, DIY robocars. So Chris, we have lots of stuff that we could talk with you about. Of course, your history at Wired, all the stuff you're doing with drones. We want to focus in on the drones i read in your amazon bio that you said you have a hobby gone wrong i have an amazon bio you do on your author page i had no idea yeah it's a little bit outdated because it still calls you the editor of wired so outdated but it does say you have a hobby gone wrong uh with aerial robotics

and with 3d robotics a company you co-found kind of based on a hobby gone wrong with aerial robotics and with 3D robotics, a company you co-found kind of based on a hobby gone wrong. So I'm curious what went wrong and if you could tell us that story. Yeah, so I've described drones or 3DR as a hobby gone wrong. And what I meant by that is that the hobby was super fun, took off, became kind of a movement, and became a company, at which point it stopped being a hobby. So if you're doing something for fun, and it succeeds wildly, typically it's not fun anymore. You're spending all your time dealing with customer support, community management, then it's a company.

I don't think I have flown a drone in the last year. Bummer. Yeah. A sad ending to your amazing story. Well, tell us about the beginning of this. Back when it was fun. Go back to the fun days. I think it was.

I still have fun doing other things. And it is a perfectly natural progression. And we'll get into this probably later in the conversation. But because I miss the days of it being a hobby and fun, I decided to restart the whole thing with cars, not drones. And so today, DIY RoboCars is Autonomous Car Racing League. It's super fun and reminded me not to turn into a company. I was going to say, when are you going to transition that into a money-making organism?

I think that you and my wife are assigned to the task of answering that as never. As never. Yeah, so you were saying, talk about the transition from Moppy. Yeah, we'll go back to the fun days. Tell us how this thing got started. I know a little bit of the story because I got to hear some of this us how you this thing got started um i know a little bit of the story because i got to hear some of this can you share a little bit of the backstory jared they're like what interests you in in chris the open source open source summit

conference maybe a little bit of backstory yeah so we were at the open core summit and chris had a talk about uh drones and robotics i think it was called how i convinced the pentagon to use open source drones i mean who wouldn't be interested in that right so i was all in on and robotics. I think it was called How I Convinced the Pentagon to Use Open Source Drones. Who wouldn't be interested in that? I was all in on that talk and got to have about an hour of Chris's time just telling us this amazing story. I wanted more people to hear the story.

I emailed him and said, come on and tell us. I think it started around the time of the iPhone, if I recall. It did. It's 2007. At the time, I'm editor of Wired. I've got five kids. And my wife and I are scientists by training, and we're always trying to get the kids interested in science and technology. And we bring home projects, and they would invariably be disappointed and tell us that we're nerds, which is true.

And this particular weekend, like early 2007, two things came into the office at Wired for review. One of them was a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, which is the robotics kit. And another was like a radio control plane. And we had a deal at Wired, which is you were allowed to take a review thing home on the weekend, as long as you agree to review it. So typically, you know, I first come for serve, I grabbed these two. And I said, Okay, kids, on Saturday, we're going to build a robot. And on Sunday, we're going to fly a plane. And they're like, Okay, we'll see. So on Saturday, we diligently follow the instructions. And, you know, when you build a Lego robot, it's got, you know, wheels and it's sensors and sort of it takes all morning to put together and to program it. And it sort of very slowly, you know, moves forward until it sees a wall and then sort of moves back.

And they're like, that's stupid. We've seen transformers, right? Where are the freaking lasers? Boring. Boring. Where are the lasers? Yeah, exactly. And I yeah exactly and i was like okay fine i get it a little dull um you know by the way hollywood has ruined robotics for kids because you just can't compete with with cg the point um so then we um so i'm like okay tomorrow sunday we're gonna fly a plane. So we look on YouTube, we see these videos of acrobatics and cool stuff. And, you know, they go to the field, park with me,

and, you know, I launch the plane and it immediately flies into a tree. And they're like, that also sucked. And I kind of had to agree with them on both counts. And so I come back and I had to, like, bribe them with ice cream. And I come back and I thought to like bribe them with ice cream. And I come back and I thought, how could that have gone better? You know, clearly we needed a cooler robot and a better flying plane. And I thought, well, what if the robot was the plane? You know, what if it would just fly itself? That would be cooler. And so I Googled flying robot. And if you Google flying

robot, it turns out that you get drone. That's what a drone is. It's a flying robot. And if you Google flying robot, there turns out that you get drone. That's what a drone is. It's a flying robot. I'm like, got it. Huh? What's a drone. If you Google drone,

it's like, it's an aircraft with an autopilot, like a plane with a brain. I'm like, yeah. Okay. Wait, what's an autopilot.

If you Google autopilot, it's like sensors and compute and software. And I'm like, that's kind of what's in the Lego mind storms box. It came with, um, uh, gyros, It came with gyroscopic sensors, accelerometers, magnetometers, a Bluetooth connection, which would connect to GPS. And I'm like, I think it's kind of the same stuff that's in this box. And so we, around the dining room table, we stuck together the bits and had a nine-year-old program the code. And we had a Lego autopilot.

And then we stuck it in the plane, now retrieved from the tree. And the next weekend we went out and it worked. Not brilliantly well, but it flew. Proof of concept. And it flew by itself. Any lasers this time? No lasers, still no lasers. So they were interested for like 10 more seconds and then and i and yeah that was that was it for them and i was like what just happened right that should not be possible because you know at the time drones were like predators

and global hawks and military industrial and they were classified and super you know 10 billion dollar things and we had just built a drone drone with Lego pieces around the dining room table programmed by a nine-year-old. And it's like, okay, you know, putting aside that it's not a great drone, that should not be possible. You know, when a nine-year-old can do something that is classified, that literally export control it as munition with Lego, with toy pieces, you know, something important in this world has changed. And I wasn't clear what it was, with toy pieces it was something important in this world has changed

and um I wasn't clear what it was but I knew it was something um so I set up a website you know and you know 10 years earlier it would have been a blog and 10 years later it would have been a I don't know a twitter feed but at the moment it was at the moment it was it was a social network and so we set up a I set up a social network called DIY Drones. And it was largely so I could chronicle my own experiments but also kind of ask dumb questions. Learn, yeah. Learn, exactly. And it just so happened that my discovery at that moment had kind of coincided with a lot of other people who were discovering the same thing, which is that this sort of impossible thing had suddenly become easy. And some people had come

via, you know, advances in radio control airplanes, you know, with like, you know, electric power and better radios. Some of them had come via sort of the maker movement with like 3D printing and Arduino. Some had started playing around with the components in the iPhone, which had come out that year. That also could have been found in like a Wii controller, like the accelerometer. And, you know, everybody had sort of had, there was a kind of a, there was a glitch in the matrix. There was this sort of, you know, this disturbance in the force that had gone out in 2007. And anybody who was paying attention to hardware sort of recognized

it but but but everybody saw it slightly differently like for example the Fitbit founders had bought a Wii you know video game console and they were like they were looking at the controller and they're like what's in here and it's like oh it's just like accelerometer chip I wonder what else they could do I could do with that and they made they made the Fitbit and so and so you know everyone was kind of recognizing there was this bounty of like cool stuff that in retrospect we now call the peace dividend of the smartphone wars but that that basically um the components of smartphones and the economies of scale of the apples and the googles of the world with mem sensors um wi-fi, battery technology, GPS technology, radio technology, all these bits had transformative

effect in adjacent industries. And it was up to us to figure out how to take these bits and use them elsewhere. And my elsewhere happened to be drones. But you could see this explosion in hardware innovation around there as everyone figured out some adjacent space to explore. So yours was drones and hobby at this phase. Tell us the next step in your process. You have a website, DIY Drones. I think at this point it's growing maybe faster than you expected because like you said, it was kind of a moment in time.

Was that a strong indicator for you? Like, holy cow, there's something here and I need to keep going or were you just continuing to tinker? I was continuing to tinker. And the very first autopilot was one that, well, the very first three autopilots were ones that I had programmed, which I'm not a great developer.

So that tells you kind of what level they were at. But two things happened that sort of tipped me off this is bigger. Number one is that people started contributing their own better code and electronics designs. So that was good. And then teams started to form. People started to work with each other. So, you know, the way open source always works in my experience is that, you know to scratch your own itch, and yet you put it out there.

And it might inspire other people to do their own thing. And at some point, they start to clump. And people say, you know, rather than doing my own thing, I think I'm going to join up on your thing, or I'm going to do a pull request or a bug fix or an issue report. The moment they start working together, then you've got something. And so what we saw is that phase. I'm putting out kind of stuff. It's like our Lego autopilot made like this back in the day. It made the front page a slash dot.

Okay. So that was a thing back then. And then everyone's like, oh, that's super cool. But your code sucks, which is true. It was written by a nine-year-old. And by the way, that Lego drone is in the Lego Museum in Billund, Denmark right now. What? It's the world's first. So did Lego, did they receive it?

Did they care about it? Did they? Oh, they loved it. I mean, I was theater-wired, so, you know, it was kind of cool marketing for them. But, yeah, so I was also on the advisory board for LEGO Mindstorms later. So it all played well. By the way, a cool little bit about this. At the time, and actually still,

autopilots were considered cruise missile controllers and a weapon, or munition to use the phrase. And so they were export controlled. And if you export the technology for a cruise missile controller um you can go to guantanamo bay i mean it's like yeah it's like it's like super bad that's bad and the act of putting something on the internet is considering exporting it now you know so so technically we weaponized lego you're on shaky ground there and i was just like please please pleaseena, please, please subpoena my children so that they have to testify in Congress about how they put a Lego autopilot on the internet and committed some sort of grave crime.

Best pressed of all time, wouldn't it be? You really can't do better than that. They sadly, wiser minds, realized that the problem was not us. It was the law. What did the law change around that? At what point did sadly, wiser minds realized that the problem was not us, it was the law. Right. When did the law change around that? At what point did they get wiser to it? The law never changed. There are two things that the law accommodates. One is that there was an exemption for public domain. So if you open source the stuff, then it's considered public domain and you're no longer, you know, you're exempted.

On the assumption that no one would ever open source a cruise missile controller, but of course, that's not, that's kind of what we did. Apparently that's a bad assumption. Yeah, it's a bad assumption. And then the second exemption is that over time, the definition of, you know, military grade technology keeps evolving as technology evolves. So remember like back in the day,, a PlayStation 2 was considered export-controlled because you could be designing nuclear weapons on it or something like that. And so over time, as things become commercially available and sort of off the shelf, they fall off the list of munitions.

Now, it took, I should tell you, that it took to 2013 before the autopilot that my children made fell off the list. Oh, that quality of autopilot fell off the list. It was only once you could literally buy it in like Walmart was it considered no longer eligible. It's a constant struggle to educate the regulators that, hey, you know what? GPS is like in our phone. And they're like, huh, okay, but what kind of GPS? Is it GPS as a standalone module?

Is that still export control? Anyway, it's a long struggle, and I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore. But yeah, that's how we got around it. Did you actually have lots of meetings with them where you have to go in and explain these things? Because you have the commoditization of all these different parts. Like you said, there's this moment, and then you have this ragtag team of open source people putting out into the world the plans

for building defense mechanisms, right? And meanwhile, you have this huge industry of million dollar, million is a small number, multi-million dollar service contracts and all these things. And it's going to quickly go by the wayside. Yeah. So there's logic.

So what you just said is very logical. Thank you. The way it actually works is that you have inspectors at the ground level. And their job is just to implement the laws as they understand them. So do we have lots of meetings? Yes. Did the FBI come to the office? Many times.

And everybody was – I was going to say everyone was super nice. That isn't actually true. The FBI was super nice. Most people. Who wasn't very nice? The Export Control Administration is handled by the Department of Commerce. And they have these kind of regional inspectors. The regional inspectors have quotas of like how many people do they put behind bars today.

And they just – they were just – they didn't want to hear the logic. They're just like, you know, it looks to me like you're violating part whatever. Prove to me that you're not. And it's just years of lawyers to – just know, just to kind of like, literally, you just have to show them that this is to be bought in Walmart. Right. And then you'd need to, you know, prove that it's the same as the one you're doing right now.

And it's just, you know, unfortunately, as a pioneer, we are the ones who had to go through it first. This episode is brought to you by DigitalOcean. Guess what? DigitalOcean recently added MySQL and Redis to their list of managed databases. Their full managed databases lineup now includes the three most popular databases out there for developers. Postgres, MySQL, and Redis. It'll eliminate the complexity involved in managing, scaling, and securing your database infrastructure, and instead, get back to focusing on building value for your users. Learn more and get started for free with a $50 credit at do.co.changelog. Again, do.co slash changelog.

So while you're pioneering this and you're taking lots of meetings with scary people, sometimes nice, sometimes not so nice people, you're also, at the same time, this open source, this forum and this open source code, you're starting to build a hardware company, 3D Robotics. Tell the story of how that actually turned into a business. I know you have a co-founder, which is a very interesting tale. Unpack that for us. Yeah, so we started with the community. The community starts taking off.

People are sharing code and design files files and it's pretty exciting it's clear we're doing something and it's accelerating really fast it's still it's still very much a kind of a hacker thing um yeah but the word's getting out this is now possible and then the next generation of people come and they're like hey we heard that you can like there's a thing called you can put little letters diy in front of a drone i would totally like to have my own drone but i don't know how to program i don't know how to fab a pcb i don't know how to solder i don't know you know how to compile whatever can you just do it for me can you can we buy one you know our kit or something like that and so we said well i guess we need to turn it into a kit we

started really simple with um Blimp called Blimpduino because it used the Arduino. And it was, my kids assembled it on the dining room table in pizza boxes. We made a thousand of them for a maker fair. They sold out on Saturday. I came home and I said to the kids, Fitz, great news. Everyone loves our Blimp kit. They sold out. And they're came home and I said to the kids, Fitz, great news. Everyone loves Art Blimp Kit. They sold out.

And they're like, you know, whatever. They have no – Your kids are just completely nonplussed by this. All right, all right, all right. These are Silicon Valley kids, right? You know, it's impossible to impress them. Someday, someday they'll thank me. And I said, well, you know, we need to make more

and they're like, not going to happen. We're not doing that again. We're out. We're out. We're out. So I went on to the forums and there was this like, I was like, you know, I need someone to help, you know, put together these kits

and the smartest guy in the forums was this guy who was flying a remote control helicopter with a Wii controller. And he posted the code and YouTube videos. It was really good. And his name is Jordy Munoz. Never met him, just a guy on the forum. And he said that he had a little spare time and that he would be happy to help me. So I said, what do you need? And he said, I need $500 for parts. So I sent him like a check, like literally a check in an envelope for $500. And he sent me back a picture of him in the garage, soldering together the parts. And, you know, and I thought that was the

end of it. You know, they could really continue to be to be made, except a little e-commerce shop. And, and that was it. But he kept sending me more pictures and just like i've got some friends to help me we've moved to a garage we've moved to a bigger garage um now we bought we bought you know some pick and place machines operations and um i still never met the guy um at this point um and uh by 2012 um jordy had with a full investment of $500, we incorporated as a company, which, again, I did on the Internet. You know, never met my co-founder. No capital. San Diego, Tijuana, Mexico, we're the biggest drone manufacturer in America by a factor of 10, making more drones per month than all of America's aerospace companies combined.

We're on a $10 million run rate, and I still hadn't met my co-founder. So I'm like, maybe it was 2011, but it was early. So I'm like, the venture capitalists are like, you know, I'm still the editor of Wired. It's a hobby gone wrong. So the venture capitalists, you know, who have been saying, you know, this is kind of a thing. You should do this. You think?

Yeah. I talked to my wife about it and I said, you know, I think maybe it's, you know, media is kind of getting a tougher industry. It's still doing really well, but you could see that media was going to get tougher. I've been doing it for 12 years running Wired. Yeah. And meanwhile, this sort of side project had sprouted.

And I said, I think I might want to just raise capital and do it. And she says, well, you've got to raise, you know, a lot of capital. I'm like, how much? She said, well, a million dollars for every child. So we had five children. So I said, okay, I'll raise $5 million, which seemed a million dollars for every child. So we had five children. So I said, okay, I'll raise $5 million, which seemed like a lot at the time. And so we raised $5 million. She let me quit my job. I met my co-founder. I actually met him during a

part of the fundraising thing. And it turns out that Jordy, when I had actually started this was a, when he started this, he was 19 years old. He'd just graduated from high school in Tijuana, Mexico. He was actually in the United States because he was 19 years old. He'd just graduated from high school in Tijuana, Mexico. He was actually in the United States because he was having a child and they wanted to then the US and kind of working on citizenship stuff. That's why he had spare time. And I'd accidentally created a 21st century aerospace company with a teenage high school graduate from Tijuana who I met on the internet. I love it. Which is like perfect.

That almost never happens. Just once maybe. It doesn't sound right. But as I say, if you want to start Facebook, get a kid from a Harvard dorm room. You want to start a manufacturing company, get a kid from Tijuana. Right. That's a competitive advantage, right? That's the Shenzhen of North America. You want to start a manufacturing company? Get a kid from Tijuana. That's a competitive advantage, right? That's the Shenzhen of North America.

I didn't know what a pick-and-place machine was, and he just bought them used on eBay and downloaded the manual from the internet. I mean if you grew up in Tijuana, building electronics factories is just something people do. Explain pick-and-place just quickly. Oh, yeah. So an autopilot is basically a circuit board with lots of chips on it. And the circuit board is like a fiberglass board that you just have those made. And the Pick and Place is a robot that takes the little chips and puts them on the board very precisely on top of a goopy gray paste, which is actually solder. And then it goes into what's called a reflow oven, and then that kind of melts the solder and all becomes electrically connected.

And then there's other elements of it, but it's basically a robot that makes electronics. So Adam and I also met on the internet, and he had the change log going at the time. We're business partners, but it took us years to build up trust, didn't it, Adam? I mean, anybody you meet, you have to build up trust, but especially when you meet them online. It seemed like you, with Jordy, you didn't mind that much, maybe because it was a hobby. I didn't, yeah, trust has never been an issue for me just because I've been lucky. But, you know, I wasn't putting much at risk. It was like literally $500.

$500 and I expected nothing. I literally, you know, expected never to see it again. Did it literally not take more than $500 to scale it to the 10 million run rate you mentioned? Like $500 in to invest? They were cash flow positive on day one. Wow. I mean we subsequently were raised – after we took venture capital, we raised like $140 million. Right.

So eventually it grew up, but it was – Yeah, eventually it grew up. But the first five years – well, not five years. The first like four years of the company – no, that's not right. 2009 through – yeah, about three years of the company was all organic cash flow. Who was buying the drones? DIYers or was it – They weren't even drones at that point.

They were actually kits. Yeah, they were DIYers? They weren't even drones at that point. They were actually kits. Yeah, they were DIYers. So the whole drone community ended up being sort of two communities that came together, but never really culturally. Some of them were just like, you know, geeks who were just fascinated by new technology and robots and software and that kind of stuff. And that's where I came from. No interest in the flying part, just kind of like, this is like the hottest new thing. I got to understand it. The other community were like radio control hobbyists who wanted to extend their hobby

with autonomy and going first person view and things like that. And they were really into the flying thing. So I actually have no interest in the flying thing, which is why I don't fly drones. I was really interested in the software and the hardware and the, and, and, and, and, you know, the, and the data that, that drones could acquire. Um, and so basically you have pilots and programmers and, and the pilots look like we'd go out in the field and, and they really liked, you know, the airtime and the programmers sometimes never even flew. And so we had these two communities come together and today you still see the schism in the drone world between pilots and programmers.

Programmers are about autonomy. We want – these are robots. They should not have humans involved. No sticks. Pilots want to fly them. Pilots want to fly. So basically we banned – not banned, banned but I have a kind of policy is no sticks. I want to fly them. Pilots want to fly. So basically we banned – not banned, banned, but I have a kind of policy is no sticks. If there are sticks – sticks are like the remote control sticks.

If there are sticks involved, it's not a drone. And we actually unscrew the sticks because we still use the – for FAA compliance purposes, there still needs the ability. There still needs to be ability for a human to take over. But we actually unscrew the sticks. So just so that no one accidentally touches them. So I believe that, you know, that humans should not be flying. You know, I think, you know, whoever the Wright Brothers skeptics were right, that humans were not meant to fly. They're meant to be flown, but not to fly. So I'm 100% autonomy. And the pilots,

you know, still really like the, you you know the human centrist and the whole thing um and today you know um in the industry there's there the pilots are called operators and um and the the programmers are called developers and um uh they're still kind of in opposition uh to each other and over time um you know as long as the fa requires a so-called pilot in command, the operators still have to be there, but there's nothing left for them to do. They're literally just standing there as a kind of a statue of compliance. But we don't want them touching the sticks. It's like if you fly a jetliner across the country,

your pilot's not doing anything. I mean, you know that, right? They are just in the cockpit. Two of them are in the cockpit just in case. And maybe today – There's a social factor there as well, right? Yeah, yeah. I call it like flight theater. It's like they wear a uniform.

They've got a hat. They talk to you over the – it's all theater. Somebody has to make the announcement how many people are flying at. Everything's going to be just fine, folks. Everything's going to be just fine. Exactly. Now, they still do. They'll still take off and landing because pilots.

You can tell the difference between an autonomous landing and a manual landing. The smooth ones that you applaud, the pilot had nothing to do with that. That was all the autopilot. The bumpy ones, that was the pilot. Okay. Wow. That's not fair, by the way. But these days, like a new Airbus can take off and land and even taxi by itself.

So slightly upstream, but are you bullish on the autonomous cars then in terms of like fourth level self-driving? What are your thoughts on that in terms of autonomous? Level four. Yeah, so as my hobby is on the side now is that we do autonomous car racing. These are sort of subscales, so like one-tenth scale. Same technology, same software, same LiDAR cameras

and other sensors. Just smaller scale. Which means that we can do them indoors that nobody gets hurt. They cost less than $400. And we can race wheel to wheel, two cars on the track at the same time. Super cool. No sticks.

Really fast. No sticks. Literally, you get disqualified if you touch a stick. So we're doing level four autonomy every day in our races. That said, they crash all the time. It is all about the crashes. It is freaking demolition derby. So what makes the difference between a team then?

Is it the ability to program, the ability to fine-tune the different components to – All of the above. We basically don't want it to be about the car. So a lot of people are like, I'm going to have bigger motor, better tires. And we're like, that's kind of not the point. So we actually have basically four different classes of cars. I mean, there's two distinct classes, small and large. But within those classes, we have four different technological threads. One of them is computer vision, and that's sort of the Tesla. That's standing in for Tesla. So it's all a proxy war, right? So we're basically doing the Tesla versus Waymo everything. It's all a proxy war. Love it. So the computer vision teams are sort of standing in for Tesla. And then there's the deep learning teams. It's not a perfect analogy since Tesla uses some deep learning as well. But you have computer vision teams that are kind of classic computer vision.

And then deep learning teams fall to three classes. There's reinforcement learning, which is the Amazon approach where you sort of give it sort of goals and rewards and cost functions and things like that. There's a behavioral cloning team where you drive around manually a few times and it sort of sees the correlation between what the camera sees and what your input was and it looks like that. There's a behavioral cloning team where you drive around manually a few times and it sort of sees the correlation between what the camera sees and what your input was and it loops in that. And then there's a, um, uh, a simple supervision team, which is the NVIDIA team. And when I say NVIDIA team, I mean, based on the NVIDIA technology, Jetson Nano and all that. And that, and that team, um, and that, that approach is that basically you, you just sort of show it, you know, a hundred or 200 photos or 200 photos and you click on where you would drive if you were seeing that.

And it learns from that. And there's also things involving LiDAR and SLAM and fisheye lenses that are looking at the ceiling patterns and lights and all sorts of clever techniques. But it's basically algorithmic approaches versus other algorithms. Is there any methodology that's pulling away from the pack that's proving to be more reliable? Some of the custom ones. So you can actually see the data we posted. They just beat the fastest human, which is saying something. I would say that some of the custom approaches that are really optimized for this course were indoors at a place called Circuit Launch in Oakland. By the way, there's hundreds of these communities around the world now and about

10,000 people, but the main one is in Oakland, California. One clever approach recognizes that the lights on the ceiling of this place are kind of a distinct pattern. And so it localizes. It's got a fisheye lens, and it can sort of see the entire room from above. And there's no – one of the problems is when you're looking forward or around you on ground level, it's super – it's crowded. There's spectators on the side, other cars, et cetera. If you look up on the ceiling, it's clean.

And so it localizes itself based on that. And that one's really fast. There's another one that's doing the same thing, but we have cones on the key corners. And it localizes itself by spotting the cones with LiDAR. So those are the ones that are super optimized for this course, and they're the fastest. They're not generalizable. Obviously, if you're looking at ceiling lights, it's not going to work outdoors. So those are not generalizable approaches.

But anyway, there's the answer. Okay. So to summarize on the feasibility of level four in the real world, are you bullish on that? Not in the near term, no. And by the way, we're dealing with the same thing with drones. They're not fully autonomous for a couple reasons. The main reason is regulation. They're not allowed.

So the only way we get efficiencies is when you break the one-to-one human-robot ratio. If there's still – it's like your autopilot in your 777 is not achieving anything in terms of efficiency because you still have two pilots sitting out. Now it may make their life easier. It may be safer. If the payload is a human. If the payload is not a human, then you do have some efficiency there, right? Right. But in our case, although the payload is not a human, there still has to be a human present standing on the ground doing nothing. So we haven't actually achieved any kind of labor efficiency. And the reason we haven't is again the FAA regulations have limited us in that respect

because of the kind of pilot and command concept. We are about to break through that and there's a principle called type certification. If an aircraft is tested and considered safe by the FAA, it's allowed to do riskier things. No drone to date, I think possibly one military exception, but no commercial drone to date has been type certified. And we're going to have the first one in about a month's time. And this has to do with the recognition that drones are a low risk kind of aircraft. And that as aircraft have moved from a mechanical era in the 50s to essentially software era, the process of regulation has not kept up. And the 737 MAX crisis is a perfect example of an outdated regulatory system that basically locked the software down in 1967

when the 737 yeah and that all the software additions since then have been patches on top of the core so it's like cobalt you know in in the government and um and because because it's too hard to recertify because they basically say you know we're going to sort of look at every line of code and you can't change the code or you have to recertify there was it was very hard to improve yeah it's like legacy code by way of dictate like you have exactly exactly so so they ever i think everyone recognized that you know back in the day when code was a tiny fraction of the vehicle that was okay but now it's the majority of the vehicle's technology it's not okay anymore so rather than just sort of swap to this new approach where it's

like, hey, we're going to treat a phone like a, like a, like a, like a, playing like a phone. So, you know, Verizon doesn't look at every line of code in Android. They say, look, you know, you guys do your job, build Android the way, you know, the way you think you should. And we're going to test it on our networks. And we're going to look at its performance. And we have a battery of tests. And if it performs well, fine, you know, update the code all you want. Just don't change the performance. So the FAA is going to be doing the same thing with drones. It's called performance-based certification. And what they're saying is, you tell us how it performs. We test to make sure it really does perform that way. And you can continue to improve and fix the code as long as it doesn't change

these key performance criteria. Now, this is super good. It's a 90-day process rather than like a nine-year process. It's built on our code process, which after we got into hardware, we built a ton of drones, then got out because the Chinese were doing such a good job. We put the code into the Linux foundation as something called DroneCode. And it is today sort of the Android of the space. It runs a code stack called PX4. And so the way we develop that code and the professionalism of that consortium and our testing and simulation process

is now becoming the standard that the FAA is adopting. And that's great. They want to do this experiment at the lowest risk category. So these are vehicles that weigh about two and a half kilograms. They're flying under 400 feet, not carrying people. And we're going to build up millions of hours of evidence that this is the right way. And as we do, as the FAA gets more and more statistical power to prove this method works, they can expand it to larger drones, drones flying over people, maybe air taxis,

urban air mobility, and maybe, you know, a generation from now, you know, the next generation, you know, the next jetliners will use this certification process that had been tested on drones first. This episode is brought to you by KubeCon CloudNativeCon, and you are invited to attend this flagship conference from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, KubeCon CloudNativeCon North America 2019. That is a mouthful and an awesome conference to attend. It's happening November 18th through the 21st in San Diego, California. This conference gathers adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities.

Use the code KCNACHANGELOG19, once again KCNACHANGELOG19, to get 10% off registration. Or check the show notes for a special link to register and also a link to the convince your boss letter again check the show notes for links to learn more and register and by cross browser testing from smart bear the innovator behind the tools that make it easier for you to create better software faster if you're building a website and don't know how it's going to render across different browsers or even mobile devices you'll want to give this tool a shot. It's the only all-in-one testing platform that lets you run automated, visual, and manual UI tests across thousands of real desktop and mobile browsers. Make sure every experience is perfect for everyone who uses your site, and it's easy and completely free to try.

Check it out at crossbrowsertesting.com slash changelog. Again, crossbrowsertesting.com slash changelog. Again, crossbrowsertesting.com slash changelog. So you mentioned drone code. It's out there. Linux Foundation. We'll link it up in the show notes for everybody to go click through and check out all the different subprojects and bits and bobs. The DoD itself also seems to be adopting some of the – is DroneCode the platform that the DoD, at least in some capacity, is interested in adopting or they have adopted? Yeah, they have adopted.

You know, DoD is giant and there's many different parts of it but there's one you know basically the small drone size they can go to Walmart and they can see what you can get from TGI but they're not allowed to use TGI because Chinese and you know all that kind of stuff so they want basically and this is a case throughout the military they want what's called dual use technologies they want to sort of they want to get there but I was gonna say bang for buck but that's probably not maybe – maybe that's too on the nose for ZOD. But they want the same price performance the Chinese ones, but is trusted. And is trusted because at least parts of the DoD now recognize that open source is verifiable, that it performs well.

That Linux is correctly evangelized that open source is a good thing. Yeah. And so they've realized that the way they're going to get price for performance is with an open platform. And not only because it can be trusted and verified and checked and they know where it comes from, but also it avoids vendor lock-in. An open platform means they can get many different companies using the standard

because they hate vendor lock-in. Because vendor lock-in, it's called a program of record. And once you have a program of record, it's a monopoly. And by dictating open standards, they're essentially dictating competition. And so they've adopted elements of the drone code stack. There's a communications layer called MavLink. There's an open source ground station called Q Ground Control. And then there's the underlying code called PX4. And there's an entity in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley area,

called the Defense Innovation Unit. And they've been sort of tasked with stimulating this kind of open ecosystem for defense needs. And they're the sort of tasked with stimulating this kind of open ecosystem for defense needs, and they're the ones who have mandated this code base. So where does 3D robotics fit into this new matured world where there's an open platform? Are you just one vendor amongst many, or do you guys still have something that sets you apart? Yeah. Well, so we sort of accidentally got into hardware, then accidentally got into hardware, well, then purposely got into hardware really big um and uh you know we went back in those days in like the

2013-14 only commercial only consumer use of drones was allowed so recreational use but commercial use was not allowed so we had to go consumer and it's it was you know hard um you're talking best by you know hundreds of – Small margins. Yeah, small margins, a lot of price competition, a lot of risk. And we made, I don't know, a couple hundred thousand of these things. The Chinese did it better than us. Their economics were better.

The scale was better, et cetera. They were really innovating brilliantly. They just beat us. So we got out of consumer and just as we were doing so, the FAA allowed commercial. So we're like, look, you know, it's like, you know, why don't we make cell phones in America today? And the answer is China does a really good job of it. So instead we make cell phone software. And so that's what we did.

We said, look, you know, the drones exist. The only reason we did hardware and software is because we needed to make a vertically integrated instantiation of a drone that works. Once you could do that, once somebody else is making the hardware that's good, and you can just focus on the data, construction, geospatial. And today we're a big company in that space. And that would have been the end of it. We went from the kind of DIY phase, the components, to the full drones, to just the software. Now we're a SaaS company. SaaS is a good business. It's better margins.

All good. And that would have been the end of it. We're not for this current freakout about China, the Huawei know, all good. And that would have been the end of it were it not for this current freakout about China, you know, the Huawei, you know, stuff and all that. And, you know, what happened is that the US government essentially banned the purchase of DJI vehicles. It's a kind of a soft ban, but it's pretty clear the way the writing's done. DOD made a hard ban. The Pentagon made a hard ban. And then everybody said, you know, the government's like essentially shut down, which is really bad because, you know, among the things that they were doing

is they're fighting forest fires. The Department of Interior is fighting the forest fires in the Pacific West, California primarily. And they used drones, you know, for that to spot, you know, look through the smoke, spot hot spots, things like that. And they were at risk of having this important program shut down, public safety, fire police. You know, it was basically a problem. The fleets got grounded. And so we realized that this was kind of the best thing for drone code is that, you know, Android would only have only succeeded

because Google was there to, you was there to stick it in the hardware and get it out there. Before that, it just didn't have critical mass. We don't have a Google for drone code, but what we do have now is a market. There's a vacuum in the market where DJI is not allowed to participate, and there was demand for an open alternative. So the question is, who's going to turn that into hardware? And we did not want to get into the full hardware business at all. But we did see that there was demand for it.

So what we did is we took one of our Chinese members of DroneCode, a company called Unique out of Shanghai, and we commissioned a custom vehicle from them that was going to run, they were already using the drone code software, but we commissioned one that was appropriate for government use. And then we have them ship it over at an incomplete stage. So with the commodity elements, you know, the motors, the batteries. And you assemble it? And then we assemble it, we provision it with software in the United States, we add, you know, we basically test it.

And that hybrid of sort of, you know, then American software, and ultimately cameras and autopilots, et cetera. So the smart stuff being made in the United States and the commodity stuff being made outside the United States built around open platform. That hybrid approach is what we're promoting. And right now, some parts of the government like it. Other parts of the government say, did that atom touch China? You know, no atom that touched China shall ever touch us. You know, we're right in the middle of this, you know, silly political battle. But we think we're on the right side of it.

And we think that this hybrid approach is the way that we handle the geopolitical wars of the future. And, you know, check back in a year or two and you'll find out whether we're right. Well, if you get the components from China or assemble them yourselves and you're controlling all the software, you kind of control the security, I suppose, except for maybe potentially sneaky software hanging out somewhere. But, you know, again, if you can't control the components you're putting together, you have a control of the rough security of things. I think so too.

There was a Businessweek cover a year ago that got turned into – it's called Chipgate, where there was this allegation that circuit boards from China had like a component that was not specified on the board. And that component was like a backdoor, sneaky, whatever thing. I don't think it's, first of all, it's certainly possible. I don't think that particular story was true. I think it sort of played to the paranoia of those who wanted it to be true. But now there is a contingent within the US government who basically says that no circuit boards can touch China. Now, that's fine. We can make circuit boards in the United States. If you tell me that no plastics can touch China, no batteries can touch China, no wires can touch China, then I think we're in silly territory. And you might as well just pay Lockheed Martin a million dollars and do it the old-fashioned way.

But we're trying to find out where that line is. And right now there's a, there's a bill actually in Congress that defines the line as the autopilot, the radio, the camera, and the gimbal. If those parts, and by the way, and all the software that goes into them, if those parts are made in the United States, everything else can be made elsewhere. And I think that's appropriate. Awesome, Chris. Well, we're running

out of time here. Tell us real quick on your new hobby, DIY RoboCars. For folks interested, where's the place to go? You said there's a meetup in Oakland. What's the way? For sure. Yeah. So we have a site at DIYRoboCars.com. What you'll see is there's links to all the local meetups. There's meetups around the world. I guess we have about almost 100 at this point in Europe. I think this last weekend, there was a meetup in Stuttgart and one in Helsinki. There was one in Cambridge in the UK, et cetera. So there's a list of local meetups. There's a number of projects that you can use to get started. One of the popular ones is called Donkey Car. And I. Go to donkeycar.com.

Amazon has just released, or I think it's not clear whether Amazon's released it. Actually, I'm going to check and this is going to be a real live check. Amazon announced something called Deep Racer, which is their autonomous car, and they announced

it earlier this year. It's been delayed and delayed and delayed. I'm going to right now find out in real time whether it's shipped today as it was meant to and the answer is pins and needles pins and needles and the answer is

track package, track package it has not shipped it is not shipped so So we're all, you know, it's literally showing as like now arriving Tuesday, but it has not crossed the ship line.

And we're now sort of like slightly afraid it's going to get delayed until next year. Nvidia has a number of racers. One's called JetRacer, and one's called JetBot. So this is the new NVIDIA Jetson, which is really cool.

And there will be more, but go to DIY RoboCars and they're all linked there. I love the tagline you have there. Fast, cheap, out of control. Yeah. Slow. I think they're all equally important. You know, fast and expensive, not the point.

Slow and expensive, not the point. In control, absolutely not the point. If you watch any of the videos of our races, the crashes are half the fun. And by the way, it used to be they crashed because the software sucked. Now they crash because they're going so fast and they're so competitive. They're hitting each other as they jockey for position. And they tumble and nobody's been hurt.

Good. That's progress right there. We'll have to have you back on, Chris. We could talk more at length at some point on, especially where this is going. It seems like we could have camped out just on DIY RoboCars alone. Chris might have preferred it. It seems like you get real lit up when we talk about that. I know. Well, it's

because it's the hot new thing. And, you know, the thing is that with drones, it was technical. We solved all the technical problems like five years ago. And now it's business problems. With cars, we're still right in the middle of solving technical problems. So, you know, I'm a nerd. I like

solving technical problems. Well, we really appreciate you joining us today. It was lots of fun. And thanks a lot, Chris. Thank you. All right. Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Change Log. Hey, guess what? We have discussions on every single episode now.

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