PyRobot: Facebook’s Open-Source Robotics Framework Designed To Make Controlling Bots Easy

In the future, robots are expected to replace humans at workplace, be used to clean hazardous waste and even scope out the Lunar surface for potential human habitats.

But programming robots to perform even simple tasks isn’t easy, especially for amateur programmers. Social media giant Facebook has now launched a platform that it says can “democratize robotics” and make it easy for beginners to get going with their projects.

The robot framework called PyRobot is a part of Facebook AI, which has been working on several projects. Last week, it released a new open-source simulator called Habitat. Before that, the company had revealed that they are teaching six-legged bots to walk, VentureBeat reports.

PyRobot will not only make it easier for researchers to use robotics data sets, algorithms and models, but will also enable them set benchmarks and build on each others work, say researchers Abhinav Gupta and Saurabh Gupta on Facebook’s blog.

“We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics,” the researchers said in a paper.

The framework itself, however, is not an Operating System or OS, but is a layer above what is called as the Robot Operating System. The ROS has codes and tool that are used in robotics research to control bots. Engineers and other people building these robots often get stuck using the ROS because of its complexity.

Using PyRobot, engineers can simply write code in Python to give instructions to a robot, the publication Wired explained.

“If I'm a machine learning researcher, and I only care about going to this X,Y location, I really do not want to be bothered by all the low-level details of how actually the robot ends up getting there,” says Facebook AI researcher Abhinav Gupta, reports the Wire. “That's what we want to abstract away, so that these researchers can focus just on their applications.”

You can read the paper here.

Still Facebook isn’t the only company which is trying to unify robotics. Microsoft has added ROS on its Windows 10. Recently, the e-retailer Amazon’s cloud business AWS released RoboMaker. The service is designed to help engineers develop and implement robotic applications via the cloud.