World's Fair 2025
Rishabh Garg, Tesla Optimus — Challenges in High Performance Robotics Systems
Overview
This talk addresses the complexities of high-performance robotics systems, focusing on the critical interplay between control policies and the underlying software and hardware infrastructure. It highlights how issues that appear to stem from the control policy often originate in the communication protocols, threading, synchronization, logging, and priority management within the system. The presentation uses a simplified toy robot architecture to illustrate common pitfalls and debugging strategies.
Who should watch
- Robotics engineers and developers
- AI engineers working with real-time systems
- Product managers overseeing robotics projects
- Anyone debugging performance issues in complex robotic systems
- Engineers dealing with communication protocols and multi-threaded applications
Key takeaways
- Communication protocols like CAN, while robust, can become a bottleneck, with message transmission times impacting overall loop performance.
- Multithreading and pipelining are essential for achieving high-performance robotic systems, allowing for parallel processing of tasks like data reception and transmission.
- External transceivers and tools like can dump are crucial for diagnosing communication issues by providing timestamped data of bus activity.
- Jitter and stuttering in actuator movements can result from desynchronization between receive (RX) and transmit (TX) threads, or from policies operating on stale data due to delayed RX threads.
- Careful synchronization primitives or padding are necessary to prevent desynchronization issues between different threads.
- Excessive logging can severely degrade performance, especially when writing to disk, necessitating dedicated threads or alternative logging strategies for microcontrollers.
- Priority inversion, where high-priority processes inadvertently block essential kernel functions, can lead to system dropouts and must be managed by correctly setting process priorities.
- Understanding the entire pipeline, from hardware to software, is key to designing and debugging high-performance robotic systems.
Notable quotes
When things go wrong on the robot, when you don't see that motor move, what's the root cause? Is the policy that is not giving the command or is it the software system?
*It's almost unavoidable, right? we cannot go around this 1 millisecond gap.*
*This is inversion in action. And it will see your system again drop out for like seconds almost at a time.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.