In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of both Clearpath Robotics and OTTO Motors. Ryan speaks about the origin of Clearpath, how Clearpath focuses on making reliable robots, and the future of robotics.

Hi, everyone, welcome to the Sense Think Act Podcast. I'm the host Audrow Nash. And in today's episode I interview Ryan Gariepy, Chief Technology Officer of Clearpath robotics. Clearpath robotics makes several mobile robotics platforms that are used by researchers and corporations. We talk about the origin of Clearpath robotics, how they have focused on making extremely robust robots, how Clearpath uses ROS 1 and ROS 2, and on the future of robotics, I thought it was very interesting to see how clear path as a company has matured with expectations and the robotics industry. And I really enjoyed hearing what Ryan thinks will be the future of robotics in the next two to five years. As always, big thank you to our founding sponsor, Open Robotics, and I hope you enjoy the episode. So to start, I would love to have you just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about ClearPath, too.

Of course, the My name is Ryan Gariepy. I'm the CTO and co founder of Clearpath robotics. And I have been stuck in my office for about a year and a half and counting.

I would say I mean and I read it, would you talk a bit about the safety critical ROS just kind of thing I don't know too much about it. Right says is it using standards around cross where you see you can guarantee some sort of performance and if it's real time you can deterministically say this is going to happen at this time or we know that this task will complete and this kind of thing. The the thing which is so obviously there's various levels of you know, safety of safety guarantees and up until now and this is actually including including our products for example, a lot of the safety happens at a lower layer under ROS right on the motor controllers are their safety relays or their safety PLCs or safety controllers programmed and you know, some some safe art for your jobs or whatever and That's not that's usually not in ROS now obviously your benefits in so many reasons there are so many ways to not having to do that and the nice thing is so Russ to on its own right now you know it's not certified it's not certified it's not you know if you use everything there in ROS you're going to be able to do things like sort of like like under a like a you know under the ages need some sort or yeah MISRA C language standards or c++ or like ISO 26262 or IEC 61 508 like basically if you love the standard libraries then you you probably know what I'm talking about do dash 178 is the aerospace one so I need ROS ROS to on its own because it supports by definition so many different languages like or so many functions in full c++ then it's not going to be certified on its own right because you can do things with c++ which are considered not safe if you really really try to be specific like and you're trying to write something that's you know safety readable very high levels like you know can run a nuclear power plant levels and and what have you that you need to avoid things like any kind of dynamic memory allocation ever. And so obviously, if you if you if the ROS community built a toolset that didn't ever let you use any dynamic memory allocation then that would we'll just say not be adopted because there's a lot of places where that doesn't matter. We actually built safety rated systems and we have we've made certain choices that optimize towards time to market at the expense of a little bit of extra cost on the safety system right but that means that we can use the full gamut of c++ or Python functions now but there are companies and there are initiatives out there where they have been able to trim it down but the benefit of ROS 2 is that it was is that you can at least trim it down with ROS 1 that was just it was just on tenable like you couldn't even consider it but now you can't like it's it's it's much more technically possible thing to build you know flight capable control software that uses ROS 2 as a as a messaging pass as a message passion framework

for example. And then so you guys are migrating your Clearpath robot, you primarily run your ClearPath robots with ROS 2 correct Yeah all the all the all the custom software we do is ROS 1 right now

Is ROS 1. Any so and you mentioned the auto where you guys are using ROS 2

Sorry, sorry. autoware as in the Sofer autoware as in the community initiative, we don't use that what I was referring to was the autonomous code that are auto Ott Oh, autonomous mobile robots use gotcha so that's like everything there is remains you know ROS 1 for the time being I believe we have will be will start supporting ROS 2 will start supporting ROS 2 on some research platforms in the near future. But since I don't have the schedule up in front of me, I'm not going to I'm not going to actually say those dates because I like to support my engineering team the the I don't have a Twitter account where I just I just randomly named things on the on the the side of our of our autonomy software, we use ROS 2 for comms and we're started we are starting to consider the the migration process we just finished the Python three migration. So next up is the ROS 1 to ROS 2 migration. But as you can imagine, as you can imagine, when you have several dozen and software engineers writing code, and you know, in this code is also all going out to the factories, you we can't stop everything and just do a migration of, you know,

five systems business continues of engineering. So I've been talking with a lot of that stuff if we and of course if we find any, you know, shortcuts along the way we'll we'll definitely be short sharing them with the community because I'm sure there's other people in our, in our situation, for sure. Are you getting comments from customers, or people that are coming to you? Or they're asking for ROS 2 or how's the community? Common? Yeah, it's becoming more and more common I can say from I can say from generally looking at from generally looking at you know, the interests at ROSCon there's a lot of people developing in ROS tooth right now. And they're developing you know, very real, very serious things in ROS 2. We're and we're definitely getting interest with ours. You know, for example, One of the very things, which is ROS 2, which is very clearly ROS 2 is that if you are going to interact the API to our indoor autonomy software, for example, which is what runs all of our industrial self driving vehicles or industrial mobile robots. That's all ROS. That's, that's the API. So if you want to go and talk to one of our talk to one of our autos, ROS, who is your only option?

Gotcha. Now, let's see worse, I would love to talk about some other things. But seeing that we don't have that much time left, if we're trying to hit an hour, I would love to ask you some kind of larger questions and get your perspective on a few things. So the first, you are saying you caught the wave of robotics, really, and you guys have stayed on top of it now. And also, it seems to me from talking now, you guys also caught the open source wave, which is really exciting to be on both of those, like, just you invested in open source and the community and the amount of code out there. And the quality of code is just grown and grown. How would you? What advice would you give to a startup that is looking to do a hardware robotics startup, and they're just beginning now, and they don't have all this infrastructure, or expertise. So the first, the first bit of advice I'd give is to not is to know what you want, know what value you're bringing to the world. And partner as much as possible around that value. And what that means is, when we started our auto division, we had to build the robots from scratch, we had to build the autonomy from scratch, the fleet manager, the UI, all of our continuous integration systems, we did a bunch of like internal upgrades to like gazebo to make it fit in continuous integration systems. Like control software, a lot like all of this stuff, we did all that from scratch. But now you can basically partner or buy a lot of that stuff off the shelf. And I would really encourage any new startup in robotics to start with that and not try to build everything from scratch, have a very good idea of what they're bringing to the table. And if I look at a Yeah, if I look at the way, you know, a typical startup, you're either bringing a new technology to an existing market, or you're bringing a new market, or you're you're, you're taking an existing technology and applying it to a new market. And so the Airbnb and the Uber, for example, like they were bringing, they were, they had a market hypothesis, and they were bringing some some pretty standard technology there. Like at the time everyone had smartphones. And obviously, we all still have smartphones. But us we had we had a newer technology, which was being brought to an existing market, which was materials handling, right? And I'm using the auto example here. And the but you want to pick one, right? So are you. And these days, there's just so much technology out there. And really, I think a lot of the opportunity is all these new markets where you can apply robotics. Yeah. And that means not inventing the wheel along the way. And, you know, part of this I we spent a ton of time earlier on in this conversation talking about the ways that that ClearPath engages with people. So obviously we can support those, those sorts of customers, we've supported startups along the way. If and, you know, what, if if they're working with us, and then the startup turns around and says, You know what, I've got an order for 1000. And we're going to go and outsource that stuff to let's say, jaybo, for example, and because they're going to give us the best deal. Hey, that's cool. I don't I don't have a problem with that. Thank you. I'm glad you're succeeding, right. But there are companies like us, and then there's all sorts of off the shelf technology out there as well, that can help you along the way. So that would be the real thing. I'd say to those new robotics startups, like don't try to do all the hardware and all the autonomy and all the fee management and all the information that shows what you can use what you can't like I have I have spent those budgets. I know how much it costs. And I know Yeah, I know the stresses that it brings you. And it's it's not worth it. There's other ways to do it. Now at least. What do you think about this idea as like platform as a service or something like this for a business model? And what I mean by that would be, if I am a robotics company, I'm going to buy someone else's robot but my own code on it, and then have it do something useful. Do you think that will be a reasonable business model in the future for robotics startups? Like basically, so which are which side is the startup honor? And are they on this side of writing the app? Yes. Basically an app. Yeah, right, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's going to be I think that's going to be the case, I think, early on. It's going to be combination of the app and some tooling, not perhaps not as complex as a robot, but that you're going to get the combination of the app and the tooling. But I definitely think that's going to be the case. And we've seen this actually, through the through the recent, you know, year and a half, we've seen a lot of companies with no robotics expertise whatsoever been able to build disinfection applications, right. And that's what they've done right? Is they built a new application. They built a new application. They built some hardware, they've stuck it on a robot, and they're good. So yeah, it's it's huge. I think, I think, right? I think for now, you're going to see it as you're not going to necessarily see app, like just someone who writes apps and makes money off the app. Or was there even the app plus tooling, I think there's still going to be like, app plus tooling, plus, you know, a sales effort on its own right? Like you're, if you're selling, if you make a disinfection robot, can you've done the app, you've built the hardware, and then you're going and you're going to sell it? Right? So I don't think we're yet as disser meat disintermediate disintermediated as Apple, Apple is, for example, where they also bring you the customers. But I definitely think that the time for getting a robot off the shelf and just putting like, and just talking to its API and throwing some tools on it. That time is now like, I think that is now two years ago, it wasn't then but but in the last year or so I think we're over that tipping point, which is really exciting. I mean, I wouldn't I there's, you're still there's still going to be lacking in that the caveat there is not every space, right? Like there's no autonomy out there, which can take like, you know, what, a one or two killer robot and run it around children safely. I think that's not an off the shelf tool yet. But around a factory around a mine. Now you can do that right now. That's awesome. So you're saying like two years ago, it wasn't the case that we could do this? Now? It seems to be good. Where do you think it's going kind of projecting out? Say the next two years, next five years, 10 years, whatever it might be? Where do you think the community is going? Well, I think in general, I mean, I think in general, it's this is funny, because I actually asked a very similar question, when I interview people, for for jobs at our company send out the tables have turned, I think, I think in two years, we're definitely gonna see areas specific markets, like us ours, for example, factories, where putting robots in, or mobile robots and, or collaborative robots in is going to be a pure business decision. We have already seen this now, where people have stopped asking us to prove that the localization is going to work, for example, right? Like we either say localization works, and it does, or we say that it's probably not going to work, and we won't sell them, or we won't try to sell it, right. Like that's, but more and more, it's going to be the same calculation of always, it's just like, it's just gonna be a business decision, right? Like, robots are just something that I buy off the shelf. just purely pragmatic, which to a lesser extent, it's kind of that way with robot arms still. But in both cases, the other thing that makes that possible, is the significant decrease in integration time. And cost. And robot arms will still have a little bit of a challenge there, although many companies are starting to are starting to work around that. But you're going to see very low integration times. And because of that, it's going to be a lot more commodity like to just put some robots out in the out in the world. Five years, I mean, five years, I think we're really going to start to see robots in earnest within the general public. Again, maybe not, you know, maybe not in the daycare, but you are going to see them out in earnest in the general public doing useful things. So I don't mean in science fair projects, I don't mean little things like that. And I know that there are various trials, there are various trials of delivery robots and things like this, but I think it'll be a there'll be much more pervasive, much, much more pervasive. And we will be able to say that in certain cases, and probably not on road self driving, sorry to say, but concerning cases, the safety story is effectively salt, I think we'll be able to say that. And when you're there, you know, what that means is over that, that two to five year timeframe. That's where the real app like that, you know, the ecosystem becomes really powerful. Because you know, now we're at the point where you can write apps for our robots in a factory right now. But first, you need to get into the factory, but you can write it right now. And but now, you know, two years, five years from now, they're really going to be in front of everybody. So you'll be able to script against one of those robots. As as much as everything else, and maybe what I'll say is people might look at this and say, Well, you know, why are we saying this now? Right? Like, didn't people say this 10 years ago and 20 years ago, whatever it like, absolutely, they did, right. Like there was a glut of robot App Store companies. You know, eight years ago, nine years ago, roughly, around the time of the turtlebot, one launch. And then there was, you know, Microsoft heavily invested in robotics with Microsoft robotic studio. And that was, that was a 2000s. I think that was, but one of the things that's happening now is that all of those apps couldn't rely on safe, reliable autonomy. And then, and sort of think about his assault kind of thing. That's the that's the bad word, right? Like, yeah, you couldn't you couldn't, you need to have a target, which is useful, like a device target, which is useful. And now, that didn't used to be the case, right? Like when these app stores started, started up, you're just kind of assuming that a bunch of people on their own, we're each going to come up with safe, reliable autonomy. And that's, that's hard when you're moving, you know, hundreds of kilos around. But now now, no, I think we're in a much better place like that autonomy is well, I have, you know, many million reasons, million hours of operation to say that this is possible, right? Hmm. That is exciting. So wrapping up, do you have any? Do you have a Twitter or how can people find you or any any public links, you'd like to share anything? They can find me on LinkedIn? I unfortunately, do not. I am not part of the the Twitter, whatever, whatever, whatever it's being called. But yeah, I'm not on Twitter. I'm not on Instagram, but they can find me on LinkedIn. And in my email, which which will be needed to connect is Ryan at clear path.ai. So they can also find me on that email. But LinkedIn would be preferred, I believe. Awesome. Okay, I've enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you very much. That's all we have for you today. I enjoyed Ryan's answer to where thinks robotics will be in two to five years. Where do you think robotics will be in two to five years? Let us know in the comments on sensing gackt.com or discourse. Thank you again to Open Robotics for being our founding sponsor. Bye, everyone.

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