Getting the discussion going with an example abstract... Nowadays AI tools are incredibly prevalent and straightforward to integrate into projects and products

Getting the discussion going with an example abstract... Nowadays AI tools are incredibly prevalent and straightforward to integrate into projects and products. Yet the research process behind the underlying models and algorithms is a different animal. Built from theory and experimentation, research code is meant to be thrown away, and is often developed by programmers from academia. Building research into product-quality code is no small feat. Adding robots to the mix brings on another set of challenges -- integration with manufacturer's SW, hardware validation tests, succumbing to the ROS ecosystem. I'll talk about challenges and lessons coordinating teams of researchers and our workflows, with examples from our transition to a monolithic repo and development of product-quality robotics code.