Notes
My collection of notes on perception, robots, and building Kadr in public. Wins, mistakes, and the technical issues along the way.
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Sketching Kadr-1
A couple of weeks ago I started sketching a possible hardware layout for Kadr-1, the handheld lidar and camera rig I'm building. The main issue was to figure out which sensors go where, what holds them together and how the whole rig looks in hand. I don't draw, so that's a problem. Instead of a sketchbook I used three.js. The result is here: it is a browser 3D model that shows how all the pieces fit together and skips the true CAD details which I don't really need now. Take a look.
A bunch of sensors and a dream
For many years working in self-driving tech, I've been fascinated by the possibilities our sensor rigs can open in robotics. Cameras are good at capturing the semantics and visual fidelity of the world. Lidar scans provide physically grounded geometry which helps build an extremely accurate 3D map. But the coolest and most challenging thing is to combine them. If we do, we can reconstruct the surface of objects and add texture to it. The result is a polygon mesh and it is a good way to capture an accurate spatial memory of the world. With some additional work, these memories can be turned into realistic training environments for robots, thanks to NVIDIA's Omniverse stack.
In this project, Kadr, I'd like to explore how to make these virtual environments and how useful they can be for humans and robots.
Bottleneck for AI engineers
The bottleneck for AI engineers has shifted from producing code to verifying it.
Rust is about to explode in robotics
Mark my words: Rust is about to explode in robotics — and coding agents are the main driver.
Year 2025 for the self-driving industry
2025 was the year when self-driving tech and operations made a substantial leap forward. Waymo started driving commercially on highways — a major bet that shows their technology scales.
Thoughts on my Private Pilot License
I recently obtained my U.S. private pilot license. This is something I couldn't have even imagined a year ago. Back in Russia, when I started taking weekend exploratory flights with an instructor, the mere idea of earning a real U.S. PPL seemed so absurd and so far above my capabilities that I could only think about it in theory.