Ask HN: I quit my job over weaponized robots to start my own venture

bbarratia about 5 hours ago 72 comments

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Two weeks ago, I quit my job at a robotics company. I was working with high-end hardware (Boston Dynamics, Unitree), but I found out they were planning to mount teleoperated weapons on the robotic platforms for a demo. I’m not willing to go there, so I resigned without another offer.

I’ve decided this is the right time to go back to entrepreneurship. We're at an incredible moment for embodied intelligence, but I feel the tools and workflows we use to interact, monitor, and control these platforms are still lagging behind.

I'm currently exploring a couple of projects around how we build, test, and interact with robots. As part of my customer discovery phase, I'm trying to gather raw data on how roboticists and developers actually work day to day and what their main pain points are regarding control interfaces.

I put together a very short survey (3 mins) to validate some ideas. If you work in robotics, embedded systems, or just tinker with hardware, your input would be incredibly valuable:

Survey link: https://forms.gle/3Nm76wkeT5CMt23c8

I'm also open to discussing the ethical lines in modern robotics or anything related to ROS2 / HRI in the thread. Thanks for reading!

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Discussion (72 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rkozik1989•about 3 hours ago

Good on you for quitting, but unless you know of people in your network who're willing to buy what you're making not sure if this will work. Often times its the simplest ideas that make the most profitable businesses. You know, like selling handmade soap or coffee. The problem with what you're doing is you are trying to enter a market as the first person doing it. Which means nobody has taken the risk to prove there is a demand, and without that it means you're potentially burning a ton of time and resources with no logical place to pivot to next.

leetrout•about 4 hours ago

I am building a very similar thing after a short stent at a robotics company in 2024. The industry is very far behind more general dev experience and tooling.

I am forced to accept the popularity of ROS but I find it to generally be a terrible experience. Are you considering an alternative? Have you used foxglove?

barratia•about 4 hours ago

Hey! Great to hear from someone in the same boat. I completely agree, the general dev experience and tooling around ROS can be deeply frustrating...

I am definitely looking into Foxglove! It seems to solve many of the transport/protocol headaches, but I feel like there's still a massive gap in how we actually interact with the robots day to day, especially when you are not glued to a desktop monitor.

I'd love to hear more about your experience. What specific part of the tooling drove you crazy enough to start building an alternative?

(Also, if you are open to a quick 15-min chat to share "war" stories, let me know!)

chfritz•about 2 hours ago

Foxglove is not the only name in town. There are many, Transitive Robotics, the company I'm building is one of them. Different from Foxglove we are much more focused on live-remote monitoring and control, e.g., we have a pretty popular remote teleoperation module: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/transitive-robotics/remo... You can find all the other modules we're currently offering here: https://transitiverobotics.com/caps/ The platform itself is and remains open-source.

leetrout•about 3 hours ago

Would love to. My email is my username at gmail or my first name at my username dot com.

rcxdude•about 4 hours ago

I will second this. You might not be able to get away without ROS compatibility depending on the market but a dependancy on it is a big pain in the neck from my point of view.

440bx•about 4 hours ago

Good on you. I quit my job in the defence sector over two decades ago for the same reasons. Best decision I ever made.

bcjdjsndon•about 3 hours ago

At what point did you realise what the defence sector was?

440bx•about 2 hours ago

Well it's not all bad. Some of the stuff we did was entirely defence and disaster support. I basically got to choose projects I worked on until I was told I couldn't.

bcjdjsndon•about 2 hours ago

Oh you mean defence = good, offence = bad?

sminchev•about 4 hours ago

Robots are everywhere. Especially in the factories. I think making things automatic is good, all those stupid jobs, moving all day something from one place to another, manually is pure waste of human energy. If this energy is redirected to education, and more meaningful work, those people will be much more valuable for their community and the world. If robots are used in that direction, they can do a lot of good things, and there will be no ethical lines to cross.

Helping people enhance is a good thing!

idiotsecant•about 4 hours ago

Nobody is objecting to the loss of bad jobs. The jobs themselves are not the problem. The problem is that we tie basic human dignity to how much value that human can produce, and then remove the ability to produce that value. It leads to the stratification of society between the people who own the automation and the people who don't. That's always been a problem but we're about to enter a period of exponentially worse growth of that problem, beyond the ability of social systems to handle. A 'k shaped' future is not stable.

pizza234•about 3 hours ago

> Nobody is objecting to the loss of bad jobs. The jobs themselves are not the problem.

Very strong disagree; a lot of people is objecting. A job on an assembly line may be "bad" for somebody, but for somebody else can be a lifeline, if they won't be able to find another job soon enough and/or in reasonable conditions. Long-term, the job market can rebalance (and if unemployed people are supported in their education, it's great), but short-term displacement is a serious issue.

bcjdjsndon•about 3 hours ago

If your job is that tedious a robot could do it, it's a bad job. Do you think Sam Altman wastes a single minute on operations and the actual minutae of running a business? Fuck no he gets wageslaves like me and yo to do it

idiotsecant•about 2 hours ago

... You realize you just made exactly the same point I did, right? I know you have two eyes and 10 fingers but give those appendages a rest and reread

specproc•about 4 hours ago

Much love and respect. I quit a job over a similar matter of principle. The decision to walk was easy, but the following year wasn't.

I'm glad I did it though. We have to few years on this earth to spend our energies hurting others.

bcjdjsndon•about 3 hours ago

> We have to few years on this earth to spend our energies hurting others.

Don't you live in a nation state that uses violence to maintain the order that you've come to enjoy? Here's a harsh dose of reality for ya, suffering is unavoidable... the trick is convincing the worker class that it's easier to just cooperate

estearum•about 3 hours ago

all suffering is equal in amount and necessity

therefore it makes no sense to consider one's own role in producing, mitigating, or directing suffering in the world

i am very smart

claudiacsf•about 4 hours ago

Not helpful if all detractors leave a company that's going down a dangerous path, leaving all the trigger happy peeps to follow their worst instincts. But understandable regardless.

tqwhite•about 4 hours ago

Tough call giving up a good job. Admiration.

Chance-Device•about 4 hours ago

I do not work in robotics, but I would also like to thank you for listening to your conscience and resigning. The world needs more people like you. I hope your venture goes well!

jMyles•about 5 hours ago

Thank you so much for quitting and putting the long-term needs of humanity over your short-term economic comfort. This is nothing short of a heroic move.

I hope you are able to convince some of your colleagues to do likewise.

testemailfordg2•about 4 hours ago

I guess people making swords and arrows in the past had similar ethical dilemas in the begining, until they were attacked and then it became business as usual.

arvid-lind•about 4 hours ago

I would assume those things (at least arrows) were created for hunting food rather than killing other people, but I could be wrong. Maybe the tech there is that a lot of weapons can be created with simple components.

With robotics and AI, it feels like there are a lot of directions it could go that would lead to higher quality of life and not just temporary advantages for killing other people.

rvz•about 5 hours ago

Unfortunately, this is where robotics is going to end up. We already have drones being used in warfare. Humanoids are next.

Won't be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of humanoid robots strapped up with explosives running to their target or some of them flying to their target with drones attached.

Tangurena2•about 4 hours ago

I don't see bipedal murderbots being commonplace - they're a lot slower than 4-legged "Big Dogs". I think that the Ukraine war has shown that "slaughterbots" are far more likely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2tpwW0kmU

laydn•about 4 hours ago

bipedal murderbots... not yet... I think advanced exoskeletons will be there first. They are already testing basic ones in the field:

https://www.businessinsider.com/ukraine-exoskeleton-test-bat...

Brian_K_White•about 4 hours ago

That may be true but doesn't matter. The fact that weapons will exist and even the fact that they must exist, and even the fact that you benefit from them existing, none of that means you are obligated to work on or with them yourself.

Cakes exist and I even like them, and I do not choose to work at a bakery.

taffydavid•about 4 hours ago

Something like the robot from interstellar is probably more likely.

All the drone warfare developments remind me of the introduction of tanks during the first world war and perfected by the second world war. In the space of a few years they changed warfare. Then planes changed warfare again. Now drones. Makes you wonder what the next thing will be

ukd1•about 5 hours ago

Well humanoid / non-flying robotic weapons are already being used, and have been for a while. e.g. Zelenskyy https://x.com/KaterynaLis/status/2043827043863863404?s=20 talking about their successful use recently.

sarchertech•about 4 hours ago

He’s not talking about humanoid robots. He’s talking about tracked and wheeled weapons platforms that are essentially small RC tanks.

perlgeek•about 4 hours ago

Yet there are also many civil uses for drones, and I can totally understand the desire to involved only with the civil side of robotics.

XorNot•about 5 hours ago

Why would you build a very expensive bipedal robot to suicide bomb someone, when as you note, a very cheap flying drone could do the same thing? (and more over: already is, this is literally how drones are used in Ukraine).

Which of course leads to point 2: it's very easy to take a moral stance on weapons when you don't think you're in any danger, nor going to be doing any of the fighting otherwise.

ukd1•about 5 hours ago

Why: bipedal maybe not, but non-flying can usually carry more.

esafak•about 3 hours ago

You think the US doesn't have enough weapons? Perhaps he thought that the weapons were likely to be used in aggression rather than defense?

ForHackernews•about 4 hours ago

Why would they have to be killer robots strapped with explosives? If we have highly capable semi-autonomous robots they could be non-lethal with no risk of life to their owners. It upends the entire paradigm of kill-or-be-killed warfare.

Rather than blowing up a school full of little girls, you could deploy a swarm of thousands of fast-moving cat-sized robots armed with tasers and bolas to identify and capture targeted enemy leaders.

martythemaniak•about 3 hours ago

After many many years in fintech, I'm now getting into robotics by trying to build an autonomous snow clearing robot, think of it like a miniature electric loader.

I've been using AI heavily to do this, so everything is in ROS2 since it's "standard" and AIs have pretty good training for it. I can see how it's annoying and suboptimal if you're writing manually and after a more integrated system, but it's been pretty good for getting up and running because it's "standard" and kinda plug and play. I see why you'd want to rewrite it for production, the endless processes and nodes and startup processes can get annoying

One of the more useful things I've done so far is actually not robotics related directly, it's a Godot based "game" with a ROS bridge that lets me drive the robot from Foxglove, which I will eventlly get a vlm based agent to drive. Seems much easier and faster than Issac Sim for getting started with.

shevy-java•about 4 hours ago

I think ethics will often fall short in general. I don't mean this to be limited to the comment above by the threadstarter, but when it comes to money, most people will choose money. People will have different threshold levels of what they want to accept.

Using a survey like this is IMO not ideal though.

specproc•about 4 hours ago

There are so many ways to make money.

One doesn't need to compromise on one's values to earn.

surgical_fire•about 3 hours ago

If OP's story is true, it is commendable. Not everyone will choose principles over money.

I was in the past in the position of working for a corporation I personally consider to be vile, damaging to the world and society. Took me about 3 years to move elsewhere. I was not in the position to just quit, both due to finances and due to visa requirements.

I don't fault the common man for having to put up with things. But I will commend those that have the fortitude to at least turn and walk away.

Imustaskforhelp•about 5 hours ago

can I recommend to you to not use google forms, I know that they are convenient but they aren't privacy friendly.

There are many open source solutions out there: https://alternativeto.net/software/google-forms/?license=ope... I recommend if you can choose any of privacy friendly options, thanks and have a nice day.

macrolet•about 5 hours ago

Perhaps we need something like hnforms or startupforms, to help founders?

cardamomo•about 5 hours ago

My hot take: if a founder can't spin up a simple, self-hosted webform of some sort, I'm already wary of their technical skills.

wepple•about 4 hours ago

Spinning it up is not the problem. You want to spend the time to throughly test it (or have your agent swarm test it) so you don’t waste the opportunity of having HN input?

I’d be wary of a founder with such bad NIH

Esophagus4•about 3 hours ago

I would hope a founder wouldn’t waste time on home-brewing their own web form when there are tons of off the shelf ones that all have no discernible difference.

It would be like writing your own email servers or calendar software. It would be a distraction at best.

macrolet•about 4 hours ago

I would let them do the opposite. I would make hnforms (maybe mdforms) based on the following idea.

Write a form in .md (even tell an llm to do it) and just put it online.

4ndrewl•about 4 hours ago

Only applicable if their core business is form-adjacent.

Web forms are simple like that slack notification thing is simple.

recursivegirth•about 4 hours ago

Slightly agree, however I prefer third party forms as it usually avoids a bunch of the BS with bot submissions, etc.

robin_reala•about 5 hours ago

You didn’t know Boston Dynamics was involved in weaponised platforms until 2 weeks ago? That feels like wilful ignorance at this point; DARPA was sponsoring BigDog which was revealed two decades ago: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8802-robotic-pack-mul...

barratia•about 5 hours ago

Just to clarify: I didn't work at Boston Dynamics, I worked for a company that used their hardware (among others) as platforms for our own projects.

I knew about BD's history with DARPA, of course. The issue was that my company was doing some actually really interesting non-defense work, and then decided to pivot and mount teleoperated weapons on these platforms for a new demo. That’s when I submitted my resignation :)

robin_reala•about 5 hours ago

Good clarification, thanks!

embedding-shape•about 5 hours ago

People sometimes do things they aren't sure about, and then change their mind when the proof is right in front of them. I don't think this makes them a bad person, or wilful ignorance, maybe naive or optimistic, but you could accept employment with a company who you know had "shady" sponsors in the past hoping they'll do better in the future, then when the evidence mounts against the future actually being better, you decide to leave.

Human emotions and reasoning could be internally inconsistent and conflicting, yet everything is as it should be, counter-intuitively.

pj_mukh•about 5 hours ago

Boston Dynamics has sworn off all war machine development [1].

But as expected, others have taken their place [2]. Guilt-tripping a single non-monopoly proving useless again.

[1]: https://bostondynamics.com/news/general-purpose-robots-shoul...

[2]: https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260323PD219/military-bosto...

Hendrikto•about 4 hours ago

> Boston Dynamics has sworn off all war machine development [1].

That’s just marketing bs in the same vein as “Your privacy is very important to us.”. It means nothing.

Froedlich•about 3 hours ago

Yep. Boston Dynamics has been dependent on military contracts since their founding in 1992.

The "no more military weapons" statement seems to have been after they were acquired by Hyundai.

Boston Dynamics' business is, basically, "mobility platforms." After all these years the basic development is all done; now they're pivoting to commercial markets.

There's no real difference between a "murderbot" and, say, a police riot-control platform, a fire-fighting platform, a forestry platform, etc.

They might not be explicitly developing weapon packages any more, but there are plenty of other companies who will be happy to take the money to build them onto Boston Dynamics' platforms.

etiam•about 4 hours ago

“Your privacy is very important to us.” is technically true though. It probably does take away something from their profits, and sometimes the whole business idea, if they don't continue to rampantly violate it...

horsawlarway•about 5 hours ago

Boston Dynamics sells hardware as platforms for other companies to build on (ex: Spot/Stretch).

He said he worked with their hardware, not that he worked for Boston Dynamics.

Entirely possible to be working with a platform provided by Boston Dynamics at a company that is not engaged in weapons development.

Philpax•about 5 hours ago

They weren't working for BD, they were working for a company using BD's platforms.

jmalicki•about 4 hours ago

DARPA sponsors lots of things that aren't specifically about weapons or killing people - medical treatment, logistics, etc. that are useful for defense/war but generally applicable.

Sure, Boston Dynamics is a bit more obvious there, but merely having DARPA funding doesn't mean it's about killing people.

vb-8448•about 5 hours ago

> I’m not willing to go there

Unfortunately it doesn't matter, some else will go ... just look at the ukr war.

busterarm•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, can I have OP's old job?