Everyone Can Build a Robot: Open Source Embodied AI With Seeed Studio | NVIDIA AI Podcast Ep. 300

0:00Elaine Wu:Previously, you need to spend months of trainings to understand the spatial planning on the robots, how it moves. But now what you do with the robots is after they're setting up, you train it. Like you train a dog. You teach it how to do it by holding its hand to do the operations for several times. Then you send all the data back to train on the cloud and deploy on a JSON.

0:27Eric Pan:Welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm Noah Kravitz. Our guests today are Elaine Wu and Eric Pan from Seed Studio. Eric is the CEO. Elaine is the head of robotics. And if you're not watching this on video, if you're listening on audio, you might want to check out the video stream. We've got a handful of robot companions with us today. We're going to get some demos. We're going to talk about open robotics, open claw, edge computing, robotics and AI, all kinds of great stuff. So let's get into it. Eric, Elaine, welcome. Thanks for joining the NVIDIA AI podcast. Pleasure. Thank you for inviting us.

1:05Eric Pan:Thank you for having us. And thank you for bringing your friends. So maybe we can start, and Eric, I'll ask you first, for a little bit of an overview for listeners, viewers who might not know Seed Studio, what the company is and how you moved from open hardware into robotics and edge AI.

1:22Elaine Wu:Sure. So at City Studio, we have been supporting the global communities on open source hardware from 2008 for 18 years. So we do starting by open source hardware modules, but we move on to all kinds of devices. We worked with NVIDIA for several years around JS Nanos, but now we have a lot more robotics, open source robotics from ARM, from little desktop embodiments. So this goes on. Yeah.

1:51Eric Pan:So as NVIDIA Elite Partner, so I see that our AI robotics team have built a lineup of the Jetson All-Rain devices as the most powerful and advanced robot brain. Together with that, we also have a full stack of robotic components from perception and from the control. So I see that our mission is make technology more accessible to everyone. And so how is this convergence of AI and open AI and robotics, hardware, and technologies now like OpenClaw? How is this shaping the world of robotics and open robotics?

2:31Elaine Wu:I think it's a very evolving and progressive trend. If you're starting to understand microcontrollers, okay, everybody can use microcontrollers through all the open source hardware and maker movement. Then gradually people realize, okay, I have open source hardware, can I use it for industries? Can I do real projects with that? So you see a lot of IoT, a lot of robotics in early times start to pop up. Because it's easier for everyone cross boundaries, coming from different industries. Now they can use technology for themselves, no matter where they are all over the world. And with all the AI or this energetic AI, and people see it differently.

3:11Elaine Wu:okay, I can really get things talking. I can really give a soul to my creations. It's not just a machine, it's a machine that can talk to you, can get assigned on tasks. And this is becoming a new society of robots. And the community I think is the root because you don't need one robot for everything for now. It's actually going to be specialized robots with open source models covering a specific domain. And it has to be done by millions of people all over the world. So we're happy to support NVIDIA in this whole process.

3:46Eric Pan:So along those lines, why is open, the idea of open, so important to robotics? And you hinted at this, and we've been talking with Frontier AI companies, you know, building models and building software tools, and just talking about how open source, the open community, It's just things are advancing so much faster than they would be otherwise with everybody collaborating. Is it a similar thing in the robotics community? Why is Open? Seed Studio has always been built on Open. Why is that so important?

4:17Elaine Wu:Yeah, I think a very important factor is people don't know what to build to be the number one creation. So it's not a game. People are trying all kinds of diversities. It's like biology that you have see all kinds of creatures. They compete with each other, they evolve with each other. Then we have the best creatures for every domain. And through open source, it's not only the technologies evolving fast because people can contribute with their own talents. And also it's a trust. It's for adoption. So imagine you need to have an AI in your home, in your factories, in your retail stores, you want it controllable.

5:01Elaine Wu:You want to be able to modify it. You don't want to be locked away. So open source is facilitating a lot of new technologies to push to new boundaries. Instead of salesperson, we have the makers, developers. They naturally, there was a curiosity to try to find out what's happening and integrate it into their business. This is, I think, by default, if you're talking about robots, that's the best way. Of course, there are closed source, the Hovian Noise. there is like traditional companies doing this forever with very expensive ways but I think what we are looking at is that's not everything we at least to give the possibility to everyone to create to their own physical AI for

5:40Eric Pan:their belongings and open and open also means accessible accessible to our developers and everyone could get in touch for example physical AI and embodied AI. So I think open the most important thing is lower the barrier and with the open module and the custom possible and also a affordable and also a bunch of the tutorial that is keeping them moving, keeping creating that and to help developers to get very easily to hands on these different products, hardware and also the open source dev kit and also also growing together with ecosystem. Right. I should have maybe asked you this at the beginning, but who are your customers?

6:26Eric Pan:Who are Seed's user base? And what are some of the, are there particular domains? You mentioned, you know, manufacturing industry, particular domains that you sell to your products, your robots are being used more than others?

6:38Elaine Wu:We have millions of customers. So most of them calling themselves makers. So it can be everyone, hobbyists, like students, but a lot of them are researchers. And they start to understand the possibility of technology and to integrate into their own domain. But they don't stop there. They move on. They're becoming employees. They're becoming startups. They're becoming the project needs in big companies. So you see the micro veins is going into every industry. So it's very hard to define who are our customers, but we see the majority by number are the students, researchers. And if we move on, we see a lot of revenue or a lot of productivity coming to small and medium businesses.

7:33Elaine Wu:Because previously they don't have the power to do that. Now they have all the resources. And they can help each other to very fast adopting technology. and also the big companies they have problems in innovation because the company might be too big right but they have all the trying to have their innovation apps in the innovation apps how do you find people they can do everything in the fast paces so the developers the makers very naturally

7:58Eric Pan:grow into all kinds of domains what's um what's your best-selling product you sell a kit how do you what does if I'm a maker and I want to get into robotics What do I buy from Seed Studio?

8:10Elaine Wu:So for now, I think for robotics we sort of mostly is called the SOAR. It's a project we're working with Hugging Face. It's an open source of ARM but costing only$200. I've seen this ARM. It's a new generation of robots. Previously you have professional robotists to program it in a very long time, debug it. They have to maintain it. So it's going to be very expensive. So you see robots more for medical, for automotive. But the robots are more disposable. Yeah,$200. $200 and the kids can use that. How about every business we can have some robots to help us? We did a lot of hacks last year. A lot of people are just using it for cooking, for barbecues.

8:54Elaine Wu:So it might be like a toy to many professionals. But we have to respect the possibility underneath. Absolutely. If they grow up, if they think seriously, how can they use affordable robots for street business for a lot of pervasive possibilities? This is actually happening, and I think that's a root, a foundation for more premium robots, premium business. And a lot of people get to learn. A lot of people get to develop this into a more mature belongings.

9:26Eric Pan:Yeah, and customers can get all of our products at our website, and we also have the global distribution channel. And also, we are pretty active in the developer ecosystem, like Arik mentioned. We host the hackathons and workshops in the different cities and countries. Yeah, so developers can easily find us. And how easy is it? How quickly could I, I'm not a developer, I'm fairly technical for a content person. How quickly, if I got one of your arms, could I get up and running with it?

10:02Elaine Wu:Previously, you need to spend months of trainings to understand the spatial planning on the robots, how it moves. Spatial planning, I'd need an extra couple months, but yeah. But now what you do with the robots is after the setting up, you train it. Yeah. Like you train a dog, you teach it how to do it with holding its hand to do the operations for several times. Then you send all the data back to train on the cloud and deploy on a Jetson. The Jetson will use diffusion model to detect with the cameras to try and find the best way to execute the projects. If it's not doing right, retrain it. So it's a very net like organically and naturally it should be for the skilled person who is like a chef who is a blacksmith trying to teach a robot in an organic way to make it happen but it's not for someone else right it can be done for themselves this is my robot it has an inheritance or it's my apprentice right helping me to do something and it can help me on my business but not giving away my business is not replacing me it's the robot I acquired and it's going to enhance my operations absolutely yeah yeah this is really like I think it's a different mechanism and even

11:16Eric Pan:different business model and it's the same way that we talk about um you know screen-based AI right that it's not replacing it's augmenting it's I use AI tools all the time they help me do things faster better you know but they're not taking my job so yeah it's it's wild to see this coming into the physical world in sort of a bigger mainstream kind of way. It's just amazing. I wanted to ask you about, you mentioned, Elaine, the partnership being an elite partner with NVIDIA. Could you speak a little bit to that relationship and what it brings to the seed community? So we started working with NVIDIA back to seven years ago, starting from the Jets and Nano, and then we become the invadia elite partner and then by making the invader Jetson, Kara boards and also the devices.

12:09Eric Pan:So by this, invadia helped us a lot. So first, I would say first off, all thanks for the trust for building up this partnership and then becoming the partner of the invadia we get a very deeply tech support and to helping us to get this hardware and the products ready to market. And secondly, I think invaders are emerging technologies. It's pretty active in their community like Jetson AI lab and also their forum and also their tech stack like ISEXM and the group from their SDK to the models. So we're aware pretty actively working together with the ecosystem to put in these emerging technologies into our devices, make that as a solution, as the tutorial or the demos.

12:59Eric Pan:And can I ask you how everybody's talking about OpenClaw? We've got a claw on the table here. How is the integration of OpenClaw onto Jetson accelerated, enhanced your development process? Yeah, so for the OpenClaw, we have the different angle choice. So first, it's application-wise. So now, before as Eric mentioned, previously if you want to program a robotic application that will be very complex, you'll need to program from this perception and to it control, I mean, almost every part of the robots, you'll need to hard code that. And now, through the OpenClaw, we have tried, we have installed OpenClaw locally on the Jetson's work and also it called the local API of the model which tried the Q1 3.5 certified billing model and it can do if I text on the chat box of the open claw like move up the robot arm move down or pick up the claw and it can directly execute the task of that.

14:07Eric Pan:So that is also transforming the way where how we code. It's not coding anymore. It's just the texting and to control the arm. And the other way is that is a way for Jetson users. I think the update, so update the repositories or the update, the debug, the issue inside of the Jetson, that will be a time-consuming thing. So if we get the OpenCloud inside the Jetson, it It can quickly help you debug or update the necessary thing on the Jetson. So that will be an upgrade efficiency, yes.

14:50Elaine Wu:Right. And to sum up, I think it's not only just a tool. The robot arm is becoming cloud itself. It's very agentic. So the process is we connect this about two weeks ago to open cloud. And to try to ask it, we give it a wild try. Find yourself in the libraries, you are in the SOR, and find your libraries, read instructions, and build yourself into a physical world. It put together all the libraries and tried to plan what do you mean by moving centimeters up. So it did all these missions and we actually gave OpenCloud a physical body. Not only help you to understand the world, but help you to build the world.

15:31Elaine Wu:help you to move the physical things around you. And the way you master it is you're talking to a cloud through a message, through a WhatsApp, or through a microphone area. So I think this is totally liberating the cloud. Sometimes it feels scary. You know, you just talk to it, and then it starts to move.

15:53Eric Pan:I was speaking with Harrison Chase from Langchain, and we were talking about agents and this idea of giving an agent an identity. What that means, right? And you mentioned before about putting a soul into the robots. Exactly. Right. And so does the robot arm, does it communicate to you that it now understands, oh, I have a physical embodiment? Is it getting into that kind of thing with the identity? Exactly.

16:24Elaine Wu:Because you can write in the soul. Yeah. What's your role, what's your definitions, and what are your skills? So we give, we don't, it's very controllable. We don't ask you to try all the wild gestures. We just give it the actions you want with all the peripherals, with all the objects on the table. Now you are chef. You should help us cook this egg. Now he knows, okay, I should be following what kind of SOPs. But I think this is just a start is for a lot of people use open cloud as their personal agents. Like it'd be part of my job. But I think with all the robots, all the physical AI, you put in store open cloud into more projects, they are actually far from you.

17:13Elaine Wu:But everybody can talk to them and they can talk to each other to collaborate. We have a new society of them. But of course we need to control them in some privileges on their like authorities. Right, yes. But it's a different way we can use agents and they can have their sub-agents as well. You need a home assistant to manage all the staffs and coordinate them. You maybe need an AI camera to look at everybody's working and teach them, okay, you're going to the wrong way. And you can ask the AGV to feed the robot arm or something and the robot arm can operate according to you. Okay, I taught you to do this.

17:52Elaine Wu:Now it's for you to repeat it ten times.

17:55Eric Pan:I'm imagining in my home an orchestrator and then a robot to feed the dog What I really want is a closed folding robot and I know that's very difficult with the articulations Yeah, I'm and such but um well, we've got these robots here So this is our very new release the Rayboad arm So that is also our another open source projects now on github is already hit 1.3k stars And so for this demo, we are showing it's doing the trajectory planning. It is showing it's very smooth, it's very stable. To compare it to the SOM101, it shows it's more robust. And also, we have mirrored this route to the Invidia ASAC scene.

18:41Eric Pan:And so every position and every actuator is moving, that you can see in the RSEC scene for the simulation. Yes.

18:52Elaine Wu:So we give it two missions for the robot. It's called a Raybot. Okay. So I mean, redefine robots. Okay, got it. This is all agentic AI, but it has two, actually now it has three features. First is open source, but it can contribute. You see some of the parts, they are 3D printed. And we'll release all the files that people can turn this into like a microphone holder for you, to respond to you. They can, according to the purposes, scenarios, they rebuild the robots according to their needs. And the second thing is more applied. You can see it's not designed for learning only. People see it and feel like, okay, I want to use it.

19:30Elaine Wu:You can do something with it. And then obstacle is, how much? Would it be too expensive for my cooking, for my small business? No, it's just$1 ,000 to start with. This one's$1 ,000. $1 ,000.

19:41Eric Pan:It would be less than$1 ,000.

19:42Elaine Wu:And we're plastered with JSON Nano to do the local functions. You don't need a token. You buy JSON Nano. Everything is running for it on it. And you can work with, of course, the cloud or bigger like Thor to do more complex plannings. So you can have management system with more AI, but this more AI will be executing the SOPs accordingly. So we hope this can enable like open source applied and agentic usages. Amazing. You mentioned, obviously, that we want to stay as humans in control of the system, right, of the robots.

20:19Eric Pan:And when you're working with tools like OpenClaw, and can actually, can OpenClaw write skills for robots? Sure. It extends. It doesn't matter. Exactly. So are there concerns around safety issues? Are there particular guidelines that are specific to the robotics domain when you're working with AI and thinking about AGI?

20:40Elaine Wu:No. Because we just started to use the cloud to do that. Okay. Yeah. Still trying on the limits. Right. But for now, I think we... I forget. This just came out like a month ago. Exactly. You wake up every day and you, okay, where are we now? Right. The terrain has been changing too fast. Every day. But what we are trying to start with is we see as a robot first. so it has all the robot guidelines we should follow and if we connect to IT system it should be have all the controls as if it's a human being so we apply the basic layer first then we explore the boundaries and we have a panic button we can just shut it off it's easier because you don't need to unplug your wires for laptop you just unplug it right we should start so thinking kind of I don't know a

21:27Eric Pan:little bit abstractly and kind of thinking ahead, you know, with so many people using OpenClaw and Clawcode and these agentic tools and Langsmith and creating all of these just thousands, millions of digital creations, you know, every day being built by these agents, how do you think about applying that mentality and applying these digital creations and kind of manifesting them in the physical world through robotics?

21:53Elaine Wu:Yeah, I think it's like following the OpenCloud discussion. OpenCloud is becoming an interface, interlink between the digital world to the physical world. Now we can control robot arms. But like a lot of details, how do you really move the parts? How do you really interact with your environment? So I think that's where ISACSIM is coming to play. It's mirroring all the modelings and you can simulate before you acquire the robots, before you deploy them. and they get a very like precise renderings afterwards so you can have them that you know between them and a lot of more people before they don't have the resources like we I think until now we don't have one robot for everyone yeah so how about we more people can participate first through the online through the simulations but we built more seem to real real to seem bridges and as we have more cheap affordable robots, the sim2rayal gap will be very easily closed because a lot of people are validating, a lot of people are improving on the controls, on the details to make them smooth and practical.

23:02Elaine Wu:And you train the way of age on these simulations and deploy in the field, they can very organically, for most of people, they use them as if they are talking to a creature. This is going to be very exciting. It's amazing. It's amazing.