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    The Patent Minefield Is Already Patented.

    Rants Startups Thoughts
    It's an increasingly common refrain of the startup entrepreneur - "Patents are broken!"

    Clichéd though it may be, I believe it to be completely true.

    This week is my first week working on Triple Point Robotics full-time. I quit my secure, well-paying, and generally pretty awesome job to work on this because I really want to see more robotic technology available to the general public. I know how to make it happen technically, but running a company has its own share of problems which I'm rapidly discovering. I'm pretty sure patents are going to be a persistent, huge, and irritating one.

    The main issue is that every obvious idea has been patented already. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. Regardless of the fact that patents are supposed to be non-obvious to an expert in the field, there are about a thousand patents covering minor - no, let me rephrase that, completely trivial- variations on already obvious ideas. Even the process of being a patent troll has been patented!

    Have you ever tried to buy a domain name? It's the same problem in a different guise. It's so cheap to buy a domain name that cyber-squatters have literally coded what amount to dictionary attacks on domain name registrars to purchase every available verb+noun and noun+noun combination in the .COM TLD. Patents, although stupidly expensive for startups, are so cheap for big companies that they patent tens if not hundreds of things each week.

    In my previous job, I was called upon to skim the patent landscape for devices related to measuring properties of a borehole. I found a patent on transmitting information wirelessly from down a hole to a device outside the hole. I found another on recording information down the hole on any medium, then removing it and reading the information off it at the top. In other words, you can't measure anything down a hole without violating someone's patent. Arguably, even putting a stick down a hole and looking for the water line violates these patents.

    How did anyone conclude that measuring something down a hole was non-obvious? What kind of idiots does the USPTO have working for it that they couldn't guess that the logical ways to get information out of a hole are to transmit it out, or record it down there and bring it up afterwards? Why do we allow this kind of crap to be regarded as intellectual property, let alone intellectual?

    The next stage of the problem occurs for slightly non-obvious things, or obvious but technically difficult things. Oh don't worry, they're also all patented already, but there are few if any products available that implement any sufficiently complex patent. Take for example the fairly obvious idea that if you point a camera and projector in the same direction, you can show an image on a whiteboard, annotate it, then record the result. There are at least 80 patents covering this exact same concept - I know because I've read most of them over the last few days.

    People have been having this idea since at least 1990 (Xerox has this one for example) so why, 20+ years later, can't I buy a product that does this? There are plenty of "interactive" whiteboards (about 80% of these are essentially a camera-projector system with some form of electronic pen, the rest are hugely expensive giant touch screens), but despite all the patents on the idea of doing this for a "Plain Old Whiteboard" as a form of backup, you just can't buy one. (Amusingly, if you search for "Version Control for Whiteboards" you get our products page :-), and then this hilariously over-engineered protocol for when people should be allowed to erase stuff from a workplace whiteboard.)

    So what's a poor entrepreneur to do? I posed this question on Quora and the best answer so far is the most obvious - infringe anyway and deal with the consequences later as a cost of doing business in an archaic intellectual property system. There are other options, ranging from 'give up and go home' through 'try to negotiate a license' or 'modify your product to get around the claims' to 'ignore it and hope they don't sue you before you get big enough to patent a bunch of related crap you can use defensively'. But if everyone is infringing, patenting crap just in case it's useful defensively or offensively, or using lawyers to find ways of worming their way around existing patents, then what on earth is the point in the first place?

    Am I just a hopeless libertarian for thinking that a world without any patents whatsoever might just be a better one than one in which patents are just a giant tax on doing business? The standard argument trotted out against this suggestion is that big pharmacuetical companies wouldn't ever spend the money on research, animal trials, human trials, and FDA approval if they couldn't have exclusive rights to the drug design. Sounds reasonable, but why not have a special annex for drugs and ditch software and process patents completely?

    That argument however, is one for another day. Today was for ranting about the minefield that is patent law. Thank you, Internet, for indulging me.
  • Published on

    Why I Quit My Job, Killed a Company in Six Weeks, And Still Feel Great!

    Robots Thoughts
    Image description
    This was my last job. That's me, in a helicopter, telling an eight-wheeled killer death robot what to do. And getting paid handsomely for the privilege.

    It was awesome! So why the hell did I quit?

    Well, I had an itch. I thought I wanted to start a company and ride the coming robotics revolution to fun and profit. The reality was something quite different to that, I just didn't know it at the time. Everybody I knew (and I really mean everybody) advised me that this was foolish. That I had a four month old child to support and a wife who wasn't working. That I had a mortgage to pay. That I had a seriously awesome job and an obvious career path into one of the largest and highest paying companies in the country. That the startup lifestyle is hard work, stressful, and nine times out of ten - fails.

    They were all right, but I couldn't listen. I had to learn this lesson for myself.
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    So I started a company (well, actually, we didn't get around to incorporating it, which turned out to be a good call) with two friendly colleagues, quit my job, and didn't think much about step two. We had some plans for synchronised collaborative whiteboards, and started plotting how to get funding to make this happen. We approached a business incubator who were very keen on us, less keen on the idea, but put in a lot of their time getting us to take a customer development approach.

    We did, and it was horrible. Over the next three weeks we talked to lots of potential customers - less than our advisers wanted, but more than enough to discover that our product was too expensive for the marginal improvements over related products. We moved onto product number two, followed the same approach but faster, and found the product to be less useful to people than we'd thought it would. At this point, one of my co-founders decided he'd have much more fun just building things without worrying about whether or not they'd make money, and promptly left.
    Product number three actually had a lot of interest. We found a great niche of customers with a big problem, and our product would have fixed it beautifully. Unfortunately, despite the customer development process looking good here, from a product point of view we concluded we couldn't make it cheap enough. (On the up side, in a few more years time all the components should be cheaper and better, so its something worth revisiting in the future.)

    After three rounds of this disappointment, my remaining co-founder lost interest and went AWOL. I can't blame him. I'd sold the vision of an awesome startup company building amazing technology and enjoying the process. Instead we'd experienced what is likely much more typical; hard work, disappointment, and not much to show for it other than the knowledge that it was better for these ideas to fail sooner rather than later.

    At this point I burnt out. In true burn out fashion I didn't realize this, and kept pushing on with coding, meeting people, talking to customers, and the like until my body engaged in a cunning plan to weaken my immune system and make me get sick so I'd stop. It took a full week of not doing anything at all before I realized what should have been obvious at the outset: I don't care enough about money to run a startup business.

    I want to work on cool, innovative, novel, and exciting projects with interesting, motivated, and motivating people. Provided I can earn enough by doing that (and enough isn't even that much in the grand scheme of things) I'm not too bothered whether I work for myself or for someone else.

    This begs the question however; why did I quit a job that met all these criteria? The easy answer is that I knew I didn't want to be an academic. But since the job was a stepping stone to a similar, higher paying job in industry, there's a more complex answer hiding away in here somewhere. Ultimately, I think it's that I want to move a bit faster, have more opportunity for learning, and to see my work get used by real people. Academia is slow, procedural, and if more than ten people care about your work, you're probably doing well. As an example, since quitting my job, a paper I wrote eighteen months earlier has only just been accepted.
    This whole post has told the story through a lens of failure, but that's not the only way to read it. I recently stumbled upon Robbie Abed's article on how to find your dream job. Roughly summarised; quit, start a company, expect it to fail, tell everyone about it, build a new network, talk up your product (not yourself), help people out, and finally "Accept Failure. Ask For Help." Sure, I didn't set out like this, but if I tell this same story through that lens instead, then I'm already up to step eight and ready to rock whatever opportunity comes knocking.

    Maybe it's your company - if you need an inventive, capable, problem-solving engineer, get in touch.
  • Published on

    Future Projections

    In the not-too-distant future, projectors will replace screens as the dominant mode of displaying visual information with a robot.

    There are several reasons for this, but the most critical is that a screen can only go where you can physically position it. A projection can go wherever you can see. When you add to this the fact that projections are the only way of doing augmented reality that is physically proximate to the reality being augmented, and the best way of doing so for multiple people to see at once, it's clear that there's a huge opportunity here.

    Unlike screens, projectors don't require semi-permanent infrastructure; you can put a picture in the same place on a wall starting with the projector in a bunch of different locations - or on a mobile robot. The power and data cords also go to the projector, not the projection - not so for a screen.

    Projections scale more easily than screens; you can't make a big screen bigger, and if you shrink the picture there's a lot of wasted space. With a projector if you want the picture on your hand rather than the wall, you just point it at your hand. If you want the picture to be larger, you just move the projector away from the wall a bit more.

    For robots, projectors just make so much sense! So why do most consumer robots with visual output on the market today use a screen?
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    I suspect that the main reason is an implicit anthropomorphism like that I discussed in my previous post. Designers still think that people want to look at the robot, so they put a screen on it.

    I prefer a contrary approach: people shouldn't be looking at the robot - they should be looking at the information it presents. Given that approach, it makes a lot more sense to put the visual information where it's most accessible to the user, and I see no good reason why this should be co-located with the robot.

    Technology should solve problems, but should do so in the least interruptive manner possible. For this reason, I want to see more robots that stay out of your way until they're needed, that don't bug you with notifications, that drive themselves from A to B, and that give you the information you want, where you want it.
  • Published on

    Stop Anthropomorphising Design

    Robots Thoughts
    Image description
    Anthropomorphisation is the attribution of human-like qualities to another thing. People often do this with robots, saying things like 'it wants to drive over there' or 'it saw me and turned around!'. When this happens naturally it can be a great indication of user friendly robot. But note that it happens when the robot is in the hands of end users. By contrast, anthropomorphisation of design happens at the beginning of a project. The concept crops up in design and engineering all too often in the guise of 'well this is how humans do X, so our system should emulate that'. In many cases, and especially so in robotics, this is a bad thing™.

    Why? Because it limits the space of possibilities that the designers might consider, and worse, it leads to systems that fail to exploit their strengths and instead compete with the strengths of a completely different system.
    As an example, someone commented recently on an IEEE Spectrum article about Google's autonomous vehicles: "No doubt it's a great step ahead in automation... but but but. Something is wrong.. because ... We [Drivers] has no computers in our heads, so we don't measure lengths, compute logarithms nor adding two numbers when we drive."

    In all fairness, this commenter might not have been an engineer or designer, but this is backwards thinking. And on the Hacker News post about the same article, more people suggested that Google's team should focus on visual sensing, with such comments as "the technology is impressive, but humans drive okay without LIDAR, radar, or GPS." (Again to be fair, this commenter clarified his thoughts later, pointing out that he meant they should look at visual sensing as well.)

    Fortunately, Sebastian Thrun and his team are designing an autonomous vehicle to drive at and beyond the abilities of a human. They are not designing an autonomous vehicle to mimic what a human would do. They realise that computers are incredibly good at computation over massive amounts of data, and pretty lousy at almost everything to do with vision. Humans are pretty slow at calculations, but our eye/brain combination is amazing at spotting patterns, detecting changes, and spotting moving objects in clutter. So Thrun's team plays to computers' strengths - they pre-scan the world ahead of time (incidentally this is a very smart move by Google - their competitors will struggle with the scale required to do this) and then have the two comparatively simple jobs of working out where their current sensor picture fits into that map, and what the differences are. They don't use visual SLAM, they use a particle filter and (as far as I can tell), ICP for scan matching - computationally intensive, but again, playing to their strengths.

    This is just one example, but this kind of thinking turns up again and again. When we talk to customers about mobile robots in their homes, and mention that we have a very neat omni-directional wheeled platform, they often ask why we're not using legs to avoid the dreaded stairs problem. This is constrained thinking, led by anthropomorphic tendencies. Why are legs the first solution people think of? Why not flying robots? (don't laugh too hard - four out of the first fifty people we spoke with suggested this! Relax, we're not going there...) Why not a flexi-track like a packbot? Why not a stair lift? Why not just bank on robots being cheap enough to have one on each level?
    Image description
    Humans work well with legs, machines don't. Don't ignore wheels just because nature did.

    And that's the take-away message from all this: play to your strengths. Don't emulate nature unless your system is well suited to doing so. Stop anthropomorphising design.