WHY NOW
Two shifts created the gap.
HARDWARE IS HETEROGENEOUS NOW
Five years ago a team picked one platform. Today every team spans compute targets: Jetson for perception, ESP32 for low-level control, custom boards for accelerators. Existing tooling assumes one target.
AI IS THE APPLICATION LAYER
Robot behavior is composed from learned policies, perception models, and controllers. Every team builds the integration plumbing itself. The development environment for AI-native robotics does not exist yet.
every tech wave produced the company that owned the workbench. games got Unreal. code got GitHub. data got Databricks. robotics still rebuilds the workbench project by project.