Drift - AI agent to run robot simulations faster and reliably
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Build robotics simulation in minutes, straight from your terminal with just prompts. Everything you need for ROS, Simulator, Plugins, and OS orchestration. Build any robot and world, launch it in simulation, and wire up your control loop - all from a single prompt. Fix issues swiftly with drift as it actively tracks all ROS states, workspace and the simulator.
Replies
Drift
Hi PH - I am Nikhil, Co-founder of Drift. With my team : @sanjil_j and @swastika_yadav1
We spent the past 10+ years obsessing over one question: why is it still so painful to get a robot into reality?
Get started easily : Docs for quick start
Engineers spend 60% of their time building simulations but -
Simulation environments always get into setup & runtime nightmares.
Robotics engineers feel like software or IT engineers fixing these issues, taking away their focus from the actual robot, the physics, the maths - which is their actual motivation to build in robotics!
Current coding agents don’t have the necessary context, control and understanding of orchestrating - ROS, simulator, OS, plugins together to get simulations running reliably.
Drift fixes this.
You describe what you want, it handles the rest - generating/editing robot & world description, publishing ROS nodes, setting up the simulator, generating controller configs, launch files, building the workspace, launching the sim. When something breaks, it inspects running nodes, checks topic connections, traces the command chain, understands from previous success-fail chains and fixes it.
Right now Drift is completely free in public beta.
Happy to answer any questions here and would love your feedback.
Try it, break it, and tell us what’s missing.
Join our discord for updates: Discord
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Drift
Hey, install drift in 30 seconds, just paste this in terminal: curl -fsSL https://godrift.ai/install | bash
Drift
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I'm Swastika, devrel at Drift AI and I'll be honest, I'm the newest person on this team. I joined not too long ago, came from a completely different corner of tech, and knew next to nothing about robotics when I walked in.
That's actually why I wanted to drop a comment here.
Because if someone like me, with zero robotics background, can get Drift running, set up a simulation, and start actually understanding what's happening under the hood, then I genuinely believe any developer can. The whole point of Drift is that you shouldn't need to be a simulation expert to work with one.
That said, getting started with any new tool has its rough edges, especially on day one. So I'm here. If you're trying to install Drift and hitting a wall, if something isn't working on your Mac (Drift runs on Ubuntu but works well on MAC with VMware), if your simulation isn't launching or your ROS environment is being weird; drop a comment below or reach out directly. I'll be watching this thread all day and will personally help you.
Really proud of what this small team has built and excited to see what you all do with it.
Give it a try ❤️🦾
@swastika_yadav1 The VMware workaround for Mac is interesting. Any plans for native macOS support soon?
Drift
@himani_sah1 The current constraint with macOS is support for simulator used in robotics. Until now, because these tools require GPU acceleration, they are not built for macOS. Drift as an agent orchestrates these simulators.
Thus native support on macOS will currently take some time. But if even a niche part of the development/deployment for robotics starts happening on macOS, we will come out with it's native support.
Currently, robotics development is dominated by Linux.
@swastika_yadav1
Can I bring my own existing ROS workspace into drift, or does it only work with robots it generates itself? I have my own robot I've been working on.
Drift
@abhiranjan_mehta
Hey!
Yes, you can simply start Drift in the terminal in your workspace or VS code terminal. Drift can edit, debug, build and launch in existing workspaces.
You can ask it to edit your existing robot description files, world files, and wire up your workspace to launch with your controls.
Hope this answers your question. Let us know if you need any help!
Product Hunt
Drift
Hey @curiouskitty, excellent question actually. User control and trust is of utmost importance to us. We ask the users for their permission to execute commands and edit files, because developers want clarity in the changes being done to their workspace or commands being run, as these pipelines will eventually run on the actual robot too.
Documentation.AI
Congrats. How Drift compares to existing ROS tooling in terms of debugging depth?
Drift
@roopreddy Hi, you can talk to Drift to get your issues resolved faster. Along with that, existing ROS tools have very limited context across the entire workspace and running nodes, whereas drift has the complete context of not just your workspace but also is trained to handle ROS and simulator related issues.
Congrats!! Any plans to support cloud-based simulation runs?
Drift
Hey @zerotox
User's can currently install drift in the their remote VM's CLI and use drift to run simulators. Moving forward we plan to also offload computation for simulations to remote GPU clusters for users with decent or no GPUs. Talking to robotics engineers has made us understand that how important it is for them to have their workspace on their systems for not just privacy but also testing and iterating easily with hardware.
Nas.com
How does Drift handle failures mid-simulation? Does it auto-recover or suggest fixes only?
Drift
Hey @nuseir_yassin1
Drift auto recovers on encountering errors mid-simulation. Our goal is to free developers from all headaches of manually fixing issues as we want them to focus on building the actual behavior and features of their robots.
Because Drift has seen a lot of error and recovery scenarios in all it's training & development, so it knows how to navigate gracefully with all the available active context of the simulation environment.
Also a big fan of your content! :)
Hey, drift is awesome! I'm a mac user, does drift work for me or is this linux only? A lot of great robotics tools end up being ubuntu only and it's always a pain for mac users….
Drift
@dr_dee Great question, and totally valid concern! Drift currently runs natively on Ubuntu 20.04+, but Mac users aren't left out. You can run Drift on macOS using VMware Fusion- just make sure you spin up an x86_64 Ubuntu image (not ARM) so Drift's binary is fully compatible.
If you're on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3), this is the recommended path and it works well. Windows support isn't available yet.
Full setup steps are in the docs at https://docs.godrift.ai/getting-started/quickstart#macos-via-vmware
It takes about 10 minutes to get running on MacOS! 🙌
Really impressive — the idea of prompt-to-simulation for robotics is a huge unlock. The fact that it actively tracks ROS states and fixes issues on the fly is what separates this from just being another wrapper. Curious: do you have plans to support multi-robot swarm simulations? That would be incredible for drone research. Congrats on the launch!
Drift
Hey @xkbear,
Thanks a lot!
The tougher the simulation, the more incentive we have to make it work with Drift and have Drift support such setups. We are testing swarm robot simulations in all forms. We plan to add support for plugins like ARGoS, that can be setup easily with Drift for these simulations.
Keep a watch on upcoming launches! Cheers.
Open Wearables
been wrestling with ROS simulation setup for our hardware integrations and this looks like exactly what we needed six months ago. love that it handles the OS orchestration too - that's usually where things get messy. how does it perform with real-time constraints when you're testing control loops?
Drift
Hey @piotreksedzik
Drift helps you wire up your control logic, perception algorithms or any other intelligent model to the simulation environment, and then you can start tweaking and testing various scenarios for your robot or the world, and see how your controls are performing.
Drift also helps you writing basic to medium control algorithms. We also coming up soon with easy integration of nav and manipulations plugins for specific robot use cases.