Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial) header
Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial) profile picture

Dr. John Vial

@JohnVial

Director | PhD Robotics - Field Autonomy

 Perth, Australia
Joined January 2009
  • Tweets3.2K
  • Following626
  • Followers2.2K
429Media
Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)Photo by Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)
Against All Odds I Got My Robot To Speak On The Radio
A screenshot essay titled 'Against All Odds I Got My Robot To Speak On The Radio'. The essay narrates the author's challenging experience of preparing for a radio interview with a robot. Key hurdles include: mistakenly taking the wrong bus and being late, encountering a technical issue with the robot's battery in an elevator, forgetting crucial equipment like the AC connection rig, and struggling with wireless connectivity issues right before going live on air. Despite these obstacles, the robot eventually connects successfully, and the author describes the excitement of having their chatbot go live, engaging an audience in Perth.

ALT A screenshot essay titled 'Against All Odds I Got My Robot To Speak On The Radio'. The essay narrates the author's challenging experience of preparing for a radio interview with a robot. Key hurdles include: mistakenly taking the wrong bus and being late, encountering a technical issue with the robot's battery in an elevator, forgetting crucial equipment like the AC connection rig, and struggling with wireless connectivity issues right before going live on air. Despite these obstacles, the robot eventually connects successfully, and the author describes the excitement of having their chatbot go live, engaging an audience in Perth.

1
81
Gotta keep everything under control when the police are around ...
A screenshot essay titled 'The Police Thought My Robot Was Too Aggressive, I Thought It Was Just Excited'. The essay discusses the author's experiences with a robot named J, emphasizing its capabilities like walking and balancing, but also highlighting frustrations with its locked-down software. The author describes giving J a voice that sounds overly excited, leading to a humorous encounter with police at a coffee shop where J's enthusiastic greeting was misinterpreted as aggression. The author reflects on the need to adjust J's personality in the presence of police.

ALT A screenshot essay titled 'The Police Thought My Robot Was Too Aggressive, I Thought It Was Just Excited'. The essay discusses the author's experiences with a robot named J, emphasizing its capabilities like walking and balancing, but also highlighting frustrations with its locked-down software. The author describes giving J a voice that sounds overly excited, leading to a humorous encounter with police at a coffee shop where J's enthusiastic greeting was misinterpreted as aggression. The author reflects on the need to adjust J's personality in the presence of police.

1
138
Printing new shoes for j the robot
1
216
AI Coders Generate A New Kind Of Slop For Robotics
Screenshot essay titled 'AI Coders Generate A New Kind Of Slop For Robotics'. The essay discusses the challenges of automating valve operation in complex plants using AI coding models. It addresses the potential of low-cost robots to minimize human risk by handling valve operations but highlights issues with excessive safety interlocks introduced by the AI, which complicate the robot's movement. The author shares their experience of dealing with 'code slop', where the addition of numerous safety checks led to the robot being unable to perform its intended tasks. The conclusion emphasizes the paradox that the safest robot may end up being the one that doesn't move due to over-cautious programming.

ALT Screenshot essay titled 'AI Coders Generate A New Kind Of Slop For Robotics'. The essay discusses the challenges of automating valve operation in complex plants using AI coding models. It addresses the potential of low-cost robots to minimize human risk by handling valve operations but highlights issues with excessive safety interlocks introduced by the AI, which complicate the robot's movement. The author shares their experience of dealing with 'code slop', where the addition of numerous safety checks led to the robot being unable to perform its intended tasks. The conclusion emphasizes the paradox that the safest robot may end up being the one that doesn't move due to over-cautious programming.

104
Best robotics banter of 2026 while out in the filed: "Go PROMPT yourself!"
1
203
I just tried /goal for a big refactor job with GPT 5.5. Oh wow, it just keeps going until either its done or I run out of tokens. 8 hours of slow, deliberate refactoring. I quite like it!
226
Want your robotics field PC to share data with the world but don't want it to be exposed on the internet? Use a cloud service like AWS or cloudflare and have it upload data to a public bucket, then build a simple web page that renders that data. Simple architecture, easy to do and its usually free if you keep your data small and your web hosting to be a simple static page.
1
3
192
btop is my favorite terminal interface at the moment. It shows me system processes, CPU load, GPU load, hard drive space, networking. And it looks so cool doing it! sudo apt install btop
Image from Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)
1
1
203
Don't let your robot turn into a thermo-mix. Something that can do everything kind a ok, but if one part of it breaks then the whole thing is useless!
1
94
GPT 5.5: don’t make the whole app Haskell just because you like Haskell Me: Lets do it anyway!
122
J the robot all buckled up and ready to visit uwa and meet channel 7 news!
Image from Dr. John Vial (@JohnVial)
1
1
295
When building your Minimum Viable Robot, use as much off the shelf as you can. It's super tempting to want to write or generate all the code from scratch, to build your own electronics and circuit boards.
5
1
18
1,708
You'll tell yourself that you are building IP, but actually you are just wasting time. Your minimum viable robot just needs to prove the problem can be solved and someone will pay you. Everything else is premature optimisation.
2
190
AI will amplify your worst traits if you let it. If you're a lazy developer it will happily cut corners for you until nothing works. If you are a micro-manager it will happily design a scheme to encourage every employee to quit.
1
214
If you can't have hard conversations it will happily draft a diplomatic non answer so no-one on your team knows whats actually been decided. And it will keep telling you how awesome you are as you do it. So be careful.
196
Has anyone done any hacking on the Lytro Illum SLR camera? It seems roughly once a year I get the Lytro camera out and see if it's useful. This time it's because I currently have a tough computer vision problem and I wondered if this light field camera could help.
1
205
But sadly the firmware is locked down, and all the repos are for the earlier model. It seems that Lytro just made a cool piece of hardware and then disappeared, leaving all these units lost and unsupported.
1
136
Yet in the age of AI I wonder if anyone has turned their agent to the firmware on this thing and gotten useful stuff out of it? Have you tried fixing your old Lytro Illum?
77
Why put shoes on J the robot? His feet are perfectly good, and made of grippy rubber. But man, I don't want to have to figure out how to replace a worn out foot when we could just switch shoes. Thankfully he's a humanoid, so there are plenty of shoes for him!
1
171
When Error Messages Hide the Real Problem: A ROS 2 Lesson Opaque error messages are a special kind of frustrating. They tell you something is wrong, but not what or why. I hit one recently that perfectly illustrates this.
2
348
more replies
The real lesson: ROS 2 distros are only guaranteed to work with their own version. Humble with Humble. Jazzy with Jazzy. This is reasonable—it's how versioned systems work. But the error message doesn't tell you that's the problem.
1
54
If you hit "sequence size exceeds remaining buffer" when mixing ROS 2 versions, now you know: check your distro compatibility first. You'll save yourself hours of debugging.
1
54
Load more