Today I have found a very nice interview of Tully Foote and Melonee Wise on IEEE. I think it is a must read for everybody interested in low-cost mobile ROS robots.

Its amazing to read the thoughts they had while inventing the TurtleBot: Lower the entry barrier into ROS and keeping low cost for educational reasons. The same thing I try to achieve with my thesis and the aMoSeRo 🙂

Most of the time they speak right into my heart, the only thing I would disagree was this:

Melonee: I believe that the thing that robotics needs most is people who know how to program robots, and not as much people who focus on building robots. I’d like to see that shift in robotics competitions in general, where it’s more about what the robot is doing, as opposed to how it’s built. 

I’ve met a lot of engineers that are capable of building robots,but clearly underestimate the heavy lifting done by the computer science part – but also otherwise, some computer scientists do not have a single clue on how to move a real world motor by the power of code – someone needs to build a stable bridge between engineering and computing, and this is a person at least understanding both worlds or better mastering them, because as she also said:

Melonee: Because building robots is hard!