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Language: en
[Music]
so I gotta ask you I think this is a
fundamental and fascinating question
because iRobot has been a successful
company and a rare successful robotics
company so Anki geebo nade field
robotics with a robot curry sci-fi works
rethink robotics these were robotics
companies that were founded and run by
brilliant people but all very
unfortunately for at least for us
roboticists that and all went out of
business recently so why do you think
they didn't last longer why do you think
it is so hard to keep a robotics company
alive you know I say this only partially
in jest that back in the day before
Roomba you know I was a I was a
high-tech entrepreneur building robots
but it wasn't until I became a vacuum
cleaner salesman that we had any success
so though I mean the point is technology
alone doesn't equal a successful
business we need to go and find the
compelling need where the robot that
we're creating can deliver clearly more
value to the end user than it costs and
it's this is not a marginal thing where
you're looking at the skin like it's
closed maybe we can hold our breath and
make it work it's clearly more value
than the the cost of the robot to bring
you know in the store and I think that
the challenge has been finding those
businesses where that's true in a
sustainable fashion
you know the the when you get into
entertainment style things you could be
the cat's meow one year but 85% of toys
regardless of their merit fail to make
it to their second season it's just
super hard to do so and so that that's
just a tough business and there have
been a lot of experimentation around
what is the right type of social
companion what is the right robot in the
home that is doing something other than
tasks people do every week that they'd
rather not do and I'm not sure we've got
it all figured out right and so that you
get brilliant roboticist with super
interesting robots that ultimately don't
quite have that magical user experience
and thus the that value benefit equation
remains ambiguous so you as somebody who
dreams of robots you know changing the
world what's your estimate why how big
is the space of applications that fit
the criteria that you just described
where you can really demonstrate an
obvious significant value over the
alternative non robotic solution well I
think that we're just about none of the
way to achieving the potential of
robotics at home but we have to do it in
a a really eyes wide open
honest fashion and so another way to put
that is the potentials infinite because
we did take a few steps but you're
saying those steps is just very initial
steps so the Roomba is a hugely
successful product but you're saying
that's just the very very just the very
very beginning it's the foot in the door
and you know I think I was lucky
that in the early days of robotics
people would ask me when are you gonna
clean my floor it was something that I
grew up saying I got all these really
good ideas but everyone seems to want
their floor clean and so maybe we should
do that then your good idea earned the
right to do the next thing after that so
the good ideas have to match with the
desire of the people and then the actual
cost has to like the business the
financial aspect has to all amassed
together yeah I during our partnership
back a number of years ago the Johnson
wax they would explain to me that they
would go into homes and just watch how
people lived and try to figure out what
were they doing that they really didn't
really like to do but they had to do it
frequently enough that it was top of
mind and and understood as a a burden
hey let's make a product or come up with
a solution to make that pain point
lesyk less challenging and sometimes we
do certain burdens so often as a society
that we actually don't even realize like
it's actually hard to see that that
burden is something that could be
removed so it does require just going
into the home and staring it wait how do
I actually live life what are the pain
points yeah and it getting those
insights is a lot harder than it would
seem it should be in retrospect so how
hard on that point and you one of the
big challenges of robotics is driving
the cost to something driving the cost
down to something that consumers people
would afford so people would be less
likely to buy a Roomba for cost five
hundred thousand dollars
right which is probably sort of what I
remember would cost several decades ago
so how do you drive which I imagine is
very difficult how do you drive the cost
of a Roomba or a robot down such that
people would want to buy it when I
started building robots the cost of the
robot had a lot to do with the amount of
time it took to build it and so that we
build our robots out of aluminum I would
go spend my time in the machine shop on
the milling machine cutting out the the
parts and and so forth and then when we
got into the toy industry I realized
that if we were building up scale I
could determine the cost of the rub
instead of adding up all the hours to
mill out the parts but by weighing it
and that's liberating you can say wow
the world is has just changed as I think
about construction in a different way
the 3d CAD tools that are available to
us today the operating at scale where I
can do tooling and injection mold an
arbitrarily complicated part and the
cost is going to be basically the weight
of the plastic in that part is
incredibly exciting and liberating and
opens up all sorts of opportunities and
for the sensing part of it where we are
today is instead of trying to build skin
which is like really hard for a long
time spent creating strategies and ideas
are on how could we duplicate the skin
on the human body because it's such an
amazing sensor the instead of going down
that path
why don't we focus on vision and how
many of the problems that face a robot
trying to do real work could be solved
with a cheap camera and a big-ass
computer yeah and Moore's Law continues
to work the cell phone industry the
mobile industry is giving us better and
better tools that can run on these
embedded computers and I think we passed
a an important moment maybe two years
ago where you could put machine vision
capable processors on robots at consumer
price points and I was waiting for it
happed to happen we avoided putting
lasers on our robots to do navigation
and instead spent years researching how
to do vision based navigation because
you could just see it where these
technology trends were going and between
injection molded plastic and a camera
with a computer capable of running
machine learning and visual object
recognition I could build an incredibly
affordable incredibly capable robot and
that's going to be the future
you