PTP, I believe you meant "academic" robots instead of "professional". The robot industry is far too small for the word "professional". The only industry to demonstrate a market penetration of robot products is education for academic use. And even education robot revenue is insignificant compared to most anything else, such as Chinese restaurant plum sauce packet sales. There has never and will never be a scalable industry that is based on a foundation of complexities that limits entry and scalability.

1. There aren't enough programmers in the world to sustain and scale businesses requiring such a high level of experience/knowledge for hiring.

2. All consumer-facing products, software, support, and UI migrate to Windows for the reason stated above. This also applies to support staff scaling requirements for businesses.

3. The only place where the engineering ego receives attention is in academics. Businesses focus on the highest percentage of TAM revenue while maintaining the lowest operating cost to support new product development, growth, and market fluctuations. This is why all of the robot companies keep going out of business because they're founded and operated by engineers.

*Note: What I'm getting at is very few people want to know "how it does it", yet everyone wants to know "what it does". The choice of OS or complexities that the product is built with is irrelevant. And we should reserve the word professional for when robots actually do something consumers find useful.

Professional is very subjective... you are a good example of an exception to a market pattern, you created ez-robot later synthiam to deliver software to learn and run robots without ROS or Linux. I believe there are many other examples e.g. Lego Mindstorms (Started from talks with MIT Logo Turtle language, you mentioned last hack night) and there are lot of companies delivering solutions based on MIT scratch or Google Blocky showing that is possible to create and run robots without MSc or PhD on Robotics, Electronics or Mechanics.

But none of us are professionals we are consumers of Synthiam, EZ-Robots products and we are not professionally creating products, we are enjoying the flexibility, friendly tools on a friendly operating system Windows (used in desktops and personal computers)  and obtaining nice results without understanding all the tidbits and manbo jambo required to build and operate robots.

I feel like we just hijacked the thread.

I do feel like we are all contributing to professional robotics - in the sense that someone will make a robot product that matures the robotics industry. Moreover, successful robot companies will do so without needing to own the full-stack. Synthiam does a lot to support startup robot companies, ranging from r&d space exploration to surgical robots. Would those run windows in a production environment? You would be surprised to know the Divicini Surgical Robot runs windows. Same with the robot arm for flipping fast-food burgers run Windows.

The reason comes down to the cost of maintenance and support - if McDonald's were to employ robots running Linux and ROS, can you imagine the type of staff they would need to hire to maintain the robots at each location? A Mcdonald's at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere suddenly needs an on-call Ph.D.

So my philosophy is based on reviewing the evolution and maturity of industries our society depends on today. The most comfortable industry to overlay on the robotics industry is Computers. Computers started as complicated things that hardcore geeks continued to make challenging to save ego. Nevertheless, suddenly these companies made computers available to everyone, and BOOM!

However, what happened to those nerdy geeks who made their computers and used Unix/Linux? Today they work at datacenters maintaining VMs - sure, it is a pretty big industry and can be responsible for supporting websites. However, while Linux is the infrastructure for computing, its revenue footprint is insignificant to the industries' size that depends on it.

Where is Synthiam heading? We do not expect ARC and Synthiam's current UI to be a forever thing. It will change, but the world is not ready for it to change yet. Fact is, no one has used ARC to its fullest potential - there is much legroom left in ARC. Need to see some product ideas (proof of concepts). I was hoping the challenges that Covid introduced would shake a few things up and result in some cool robots...

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I was hoping the challenges that Covid introduced would shake a few things up and result in some cool robots...

Robomodix was all about trying to make an emotional connection (HRI) with a robot that provides information and communicates like a person. That way the robot performs (information, scheduling, chatting), in return the user feels satisfied, and instead of wanting it to dock it or have it sleep, they want to continue to use it. An emotional connection has been made.

Edit: and yes we have hi jacked this thread...

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Edit: and yes we have hi jacked this thread...

Alan

My Intel Realsense D435i arrived today. However, it's damaged and doesn't work. It'll be another week before I receive the Newegg replacement.

I got a brand new Hitachi lidar from the ebay and it works more details here: https://synthiam.com/Support/Skills/Navigation/Hitachi-LG-LDS-Lidar?id=20086

So everyone can start avoiding the obstacles yay!

PS: I only tested the Hitachi lidar plugin, not the other plugins: NMS and the navigator, I presume everything works together and no fun without a T265.

Newegg refunded me because they no longer carry the d435i.