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Excited to back @makanikai and @FRDMROBOTICS. They're building advanced tooling for robotics teams (medium.com/initialized-ca…). I'd like to elaborate on a more technical level why this tooling is super important for the next generation of robotics products.
To learn about this space, I looked into the tools that a lot of roboticists use. Many use ROS (ros.org). It's a pretty powerful platform that allows composition of different sensors (LIDAR, cameras, etc..) with software (SLAM, ML, visualization)
For instance, here's me playing around with a cheap LIDAR, trying to get it to talk to ROS. To do this, I had to write a custom client in C++, debug a bunch of crap around ports, baud rates, and the underlying LIDAR protocol. 
This is part of the inherent complexity of robotics— you're trying to do something new with a grab bag of parts and software that don't always talk nicely to one another. But here's where it gets interesting. Once I got my LIDAR talking to ROS, everything should be easy right?
Wrong. Here's a screenshot of a small python script I had to hack together just to save my LIDAR data from ROS into a specific format for debugging. It's just 122 lines, nothing crazy, but it still took me about 20 minutes (yes, I'm slow) and some back and forth to get right.
These scripts are immensely valuable. Robotics teams write them constantly to do everything. Want to save your data to S3? That's a script. Want to fetch yesterday's camera feed and replay it? New script. They're not hard but the collective burden of maintenance and time is.
It slows development down. And once teams deploy, the Rube Goldberg collection of random scripts often breaks down. Teams go blind and can't support the customer or even do basic things like debugging. That's why the tools that @FRDMROBOTICS builds are so important.
They free up teams to solve the hard parts of their stack, not the parts that should be easy. They handle capture, index, replay, and teleoperation for teams out of the box. Want to give them a try: visit them here: bit.ly/2Sv2szk
