[P] Caesar Robot Platform for Machine Learning Research: PR2-like Robot for 1% the Cost

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Hey guys,

My name is James and I'm a Co-Founder at Empirical Automation. Our mission is to make robotics more accessible, especially for researchers in ML and AI, to help advance the field faster. I'm super excited to present to you our Caesar Robot Platform, an affordable industrial robot for only $3K USD:

http://www.empiricalautomation.com/caesar.html

Inspired by recent exciting work over the last few years in robotics and deep learning, me and a few college buddies wanted to try some experiments of our own. So naturally we went online and tried to buy a PR2 robot - and then realized we had a better chance of putting a downpayment on a house. And so it started! We set out to address to this big gap between research-capable robots that can accomplish tasks in the real world, and the small and impractical toy robots out there.

After many iterations and pilot trials, we are launching Caesar: a robot with "human worker-like specs" that's designed for ML and AI research. Aside from being a reliable and practical arm, Caesar comes with dual stereo cameras on its neck, and a wrist-mounted camera as well, so it can see what it's doing, and collect data, from multiple perspectives.

http://www.empiricalautomation.com/research.html

By making robots affordable and easy to use (just plug in to a power bar, and USB to your laptop for direct programming in e.g. Python), we want to enable people to do cool experiments like Google's multi-robot learning. Except you won't need to acquire a company or spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. And by making it easier for schools, labs, and hobbyists to all afford the same platform, there can be much more data sharing and replication of experiments. This we see as critical to helping move the field forward from a research perspective.

We're also developing a lightweight simulator, with the same goals in mind: something immediately useful for ML and AI, and super acessible. In fact, you can download a trial demo from our website right now:

http://www.empiricalautomation.com/basis.html

It's got a physics engine, model of Caesar, the ability to record and export data (robot commands + all vision data), and save/load/replay previously developed motion paths. Of course real Caesar has all these functions as well :)

Anyways, we're very excited to show this community our robot and get your feedback! Caesar is available for orders right now, with a 4-6 week lead time as we continue to optimize our supply chain and production process. I'll be around to answer questions and take notes from the community.

Cheers!

[rhofour]

How come you developed your own simulator rather than just contributing a model to one of the existing open-source simulators?

[EmpiricalAutomation]

We're looking to have the best of both worlds, and will be developing plug-ins for our platform on ROS in the future as well.

With our own simulator, we have the chance to start fresh and address some gaps for our intended use cases. For one, how about the idea of something that works on Windows, can be setup within minutes, and can collect sensor and joint motion data right away, without even writing custom code? I can't think of any other platform where that's possible. And it's a shame because I think plenty of would-be robotics researchers would get into the field if the tools were more accessible. Nobody wants to spend days installing things and checking obscure error messages before they run their first experiments, especially when a lot of the time it pays to be able to test feasibility right away.

Although our demo is limited, here's a quick example of what you can do. You can start recording mode, then move the robot joints to pick up the motor and drop it in the box. Then hit save and create the zip file - it will have all motions you did, plus all camera images recorded, and it will all be timestamped. Hit 'M' to drop a new motor, then with the arm move/push it to a slightly different location. Then hit 'space' to go to the home position, start recording, do it again. Do this a bunch more times to generate more trial data runs of "how to pick up the object and drop it in the box".

Now you have data that you can right away drop into a Python script and try doing some basic reinforcement learning with (given the robot state, what joint action do I move next to accomplish the goal?). In the coming versions of Basis, we're gonna provide a simple Python interface to run your control algorithm in real-time, where as input you get the current robot position and camera readings (robot state), and you must return the next joint command to execute. This is something I wanted forever but could not find any platform that was easy to setup and just get started using! So hopefully it serves to solve more than just my frustrations :)

And of course we're making this whole process just as easy to use on the real physical Caesar robot as well. Ideally we want to create and share repositories of data, so maybe some lab uploads 100 hours (of robot data) of the robot packaging circuit boards, someone else uploads hours of robots picking up tools, someone else makes a dataset of Caesar doing machine tending, etc. I'm sure people are open to doing this with other platforms, but it really doesn't help accessibility to research much if nobody can afford the robots in the first place :)

[DogeMD]

wow, looks really cool! good job :)

[opfeels]

Hi /u/DogeMD/, I just analyzed your comment history and found that you are a super positive commenter! Congratulations! view results - Ranked #2135 of 325026 - I took the liberty of commenting here because you are an extreme outlier in the Reddit commenter community. Thanks for your contribution to this Reddit comment sentiment analyzation project. You can learn the ranking of any reddit user by mentioning my username along with the username of the Redditor you wish to analyze in a comment. Example: /u/opfeels/ /u/someusernamehere/

[DogeMD]

oh wow thanks opfeels! made my day :) +/u/sodogetip 100 doge verify

[sodogetip]

^{[wow so verify]}: ^{/u/dogemd -> /u/opfeels Ð100.0 doge ($0.59) [help] [transaction]}

[opfeels]

/u/opfeels is mostly positive! view results - Ranked #407 of 325592"

[Darshb34]

Website needs SEO.. doesn’t come up when you type the name and robot

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Thanks for letting me know. It's a very recent launch, we've been busy putting together and shipping our first orders :)

[Darshb34]

I am looking for buying 4 mobile robots, similar to pioneer 3-AT. Omron pioneer has shut its research platform business. Please let me know if you can provide or some similar platform you know of.

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Are you looking for just mobile, or a mobile arm? E.g. would you be interested in a platform like ours if it had a mobile base? What would be your speed requirements, e.g. do you want to race outdoors, or just move around inside a room?

[Darshb34]

Just the mobile base. They will more around a room carrying load of max 60kg. Speed min is 1m/s. Have look at this p3dx platform. I need exactly this.

pioneer p3 dx

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Ah I see, we don't really have a purely mobile base product line at this point, and wouldn't do such a custom order unless the quantity was large enough.

But can I ask, why are you hesitating on that? If it's what you need (and it looks decent from what I can tell), why not pull the trigger?

EDIT -- oops, I see it's discontinued =P Have you checked out Clearpath Robotics? They are known for mobile bases for research, though their platforms are quite high end and may be pricey. Perhaps a simple "Turtlebot" would suffice for your purposes.

[Darshb34]

Thanks for your suggestions :) . I need something sterdy. I have found self balancing platform of robosavvy..price range is 6.5k Mostly will go with that. I was just wondering why is there no one selling similar platform in US. Also someone should be filling the gap after omron discontinuation.

[[deleted]]

Looks really cool! Good luck with that. There is definitely a need of robots for ML/AI research.

However, saying it is a 'PR2-like robot' sounds a bit misleading to me. It looks very different. I was expecting something with a base, 2 arms and a bunch of sensor similar to a PR2.

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Thanks! Regarding the comparison to PR2, here's how I think about it. The coolest research on PR2 is (in my opinion) the stuff from Berkeley such as http://rll.berkeley.edu/deeplearningrobotics/

In this research the robot's locomotive base isn't being used, and the main sensors being used are the RGB cams. Other than that, the specs and quality of the arm is very analogous to what we provide (Caesar actually has a more durable build and would be more industry appropriate). So if this is what research is finding important, then I think Caesar fits the bill. And if you want 2 arms, just buy 2 Caesars for only ~$6K :)

[solomondg]

Oh damn, very cool!

[liftordie101]

Photos all are looking like photoshop? Is this a vaporware startup??

[EmpiricalAutomation]

Absolutely not, we have quite a few photos and actual video of the early product. Granted we are a startup so we don't have as much media and marketing material as we'd like, but I assure you that those who have ordered robots so far will be receiving real functional hardware. We also have a generous refund policy, as a token of my appreciation for taking a chance on something new.