I’ve been thinking about ways that TBP might be able to encourage Monty-based sub-projects. One possibility might be to define plausible application areas and publicize any interesting results. Occasional contests might also help to motivate some participants. Along these lines, here’s a modest proposal for a sub-project…
Some sort of robotic platform (e.g., this quadruped kit) could be used as the basis for a weeding robot. It would wander around a garden, figure out which plants “don’t belong there” and discourage them (e.g., using high-potency vinegar).
To reduce unwanted destruction, the robot would need to report suspected “weeds” and get authorization from a human gardener. Since every garden has weeds, and the definition of a weed can be rather subjective, this offers a chance for continuous learning, collaboration, etc.
those are great ideas! We have created a project showcase page (Project Showcase) where we would love to feature projects like this. We are also tossing around ideas around future workshops/hackathons and will post here if we have something more concrete.
Right now, we still need to implement some more pre-requisite features for Monty to be useful in a wider range of applications (like being better at dealing with multi-object environments, modeling compositional objects, and using policies to manipulate the world), but if you can think of a cool way to use Monty today with its more limited set of abilities, definitely let us know what you come up with! The quadruped weed robot is a cool idea but it may still require a lot of extra engineering to get working with the current version of Monty.
The Project Showcase is intended to publicize reasonably complete projects.
The RFC process is intended for formal submission of ideas for substantial changes to Monty itself.
The Discourse group is “a place for general announcements, project information, and general questions about the project”. As a threaded discussion area, it isn’t suitable for formal submission of ideas.
In short, none of these seems appropriate for presentation and discussion of unimplemented project ideas. I already have a couple of these and expect that more will emerge over time; where and how should they be posted?
We don’t have any formalized process for structured application submissions. I think this forum is probably a good starting place to talk about an idea and see if there are other people interested in building that kind of application. Then the actual formalization of it might happen as a brand new project in Github. I’d be interested to hear the community’s thoughts on good ways to track projects that use Monty.
Violent agreement: I’ve been very happy with the quantity and quality of responses I’ve received to date.
Starting and maintaining a GitHub project is rather heavyweight for an early-stage project proposal. And, although GitHub supports a wiki, there’s no obvious way for a single author to retain editorial control. So, maybe not…
However, it seems like Gist mechanism might work well for this use case. Basically, an author could create a Gist, then link to it (e.g., in a forum post). The author is then free to edit as often as desired and the readers are able to access the entire editing history.
I have a few such Gists currently under development; if I don’t hear about any better ideas, I’ll probably give this notion a try RSN.
