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Colin Angle: iRobot CEO | Lex Fridman Podcast #39


small model | large model

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The following is a conversation with Colin Engel.
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He's the CEO and cofounder of iRobot,
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a robotics company that for 29 years has been creating robots
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that operate successfully in the real world.
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Not as a demo or on a scale of dozens,
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but on a scale of thousands and millions.
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As of this year, iRobot has sold more than 25 million robots
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to consumers, including the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot,
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the Bravo floor mopping robot,
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and soon the Terra lawn mowing robot.
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29 million robots successfully operating autonomously
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in real people's homes.
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To me, it's an incredible accomplishment
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of science, engineering, logistics,
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and all kinds of general entrepreneurial innovation.
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Most robotics companies fail.
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iRobot has survived and succeeded for 29 years.
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I spent all day at iRobot, including a long tour
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and conversation with Colin about the history of iRobot,
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and then sat down for this podcast conversation
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that would have been much longer
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if I didn't spend all day learning about
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and playing with the various robots in the company's history.
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I'll release the video of the tour separately.
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Colin, iRobot, its founding team,
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its current team, and its mission
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has been and continues to be an inspiration to me
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and thousands of engineers who are working hard
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to create AI systems that help real people.
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This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.
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If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,
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give it five stars on iTunes, support it on Patreon,
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or simply connect with me on Twitter
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at Lex Freedman, spelled F R I D M A N.
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And now, here's my conversation with Colin Engel.
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In his 1942 short story, Run Around,
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from his iRobot collection, Asimov,
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proposed the three laws of robotics in order,
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don't harm humans, obey orders, protect yourself.
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So two questions.
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First, does the Roomba follow these three laws?
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And also, more seriously,
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what role do you hope to see robots take
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in modern society and in the future world?
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So the three laws are very thought provoking
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and require such a profound understanding
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of the world a robot lives in,
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the ramifications of its action
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and its own sense of self,
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that it's not a relevant bar,
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at least it won't be a relevant bar
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for decades to come.
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And so, if Roomba follows the three laws,
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and I believe it does,
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it is designed to help humans not hurt them,
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it's designed to be inherently safe,
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and we design it to last a long time.
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It's not through any AI or intent on the robot's part.
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It's because following the three laws
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is aligned with being a good robot product.
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So I guess it does,
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but not by explicit design.
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So then the bigger picture,
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what role do you hope to see robotics,
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robots take in what's currently mostly a world of humans?
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We need robots to help us continue
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to improve our standard of living.
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We need robots because the average age of humanity
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is increasing very quickly,
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and simply the number of people young enough
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and spry enough to care for the elder
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growing demographic is inadequate.
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And so what is the role of robots?
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Today, the role is to make our lives a little easier,
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a little cleaner, maybe a little healthier.
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But in time, robots are gonna be the difference
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between real gut wrenching declines
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in our ability to live independently
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and maintain our standard of living,
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and a future that is the bright one
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where we have more control of our lives,
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can spend more of our time focused
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on activities we choose.
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And I'm so honored and excited to be
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playing a role in that journey.
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So you've given me a tour,
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you showed me some of the long histories now,
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29 years that iRobot has been at it,
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creating some incredible robots.
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You showed me PacBot,
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you showed me a bunch of other stuff
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that led up to Roomba,
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that led to Brava and Tara.
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So let's skip that incredible history
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in the interest of time,
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because we already talked about it,
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I'll show this incredible footage.
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You mentioned elderly and robotics and society.
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I think the home is a fascinating place for robots to be.
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So where do you see robots in the home?
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Currently, I would say, once again,
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probably most homes in the world don't have a robot.
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So how do you see that changing?
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Where do you think is the big initial value add
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that robots can do?
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So iRobot has sort of over the years narrowed in on the home,
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the consumer's home as the place where we want to innovate
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and deliver tools that will help a home be
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a more automatically maintained place,
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a healthier place, a safer place
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and perhaps even a more efficient place to be.
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And today vacuum we mop, soon we'll be mowing your lawn,
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but where things are going is,
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when do we get to the point where the home,
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not just the robots that live in your home,
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but the home itself becomes part of a system
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that maintains itself and plays an active role
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in caring for and helping the people live in that home.
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And I see everything that we're doing
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as steps along the path toward that future.
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So what are the steps?
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So if we can summarize some of the history of Roomba,
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you've mentioned, and maybe you can elaborate on it,
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but you mentioned that the early days
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were really taking a robot from something that works
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either in the lab or something that works in the field
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that helps soldiers do the difficult work they do
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to actually be in the hands of consumers
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and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of robots
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that don't break down over how much people love them
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over months of very extensive use.
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So that was the big first step.
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And then the second big step was the ability
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to sense the environment, to build a map, to localize,
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to be able to build a picture of the home
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that the human can then attach labels to
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in terms of giving some semantic knowledge
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to the robot about its environment.
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Okay, so that's like a huge, two big, huge steps.
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Maybe you can comment on them,
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but also what is the next step
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of making a robot part of the home?
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Sure.
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So the goal is to make a home that takes care of itself,
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takes care of the people in the home
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and gives a user an experience of just living their life
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and the home is somehow doing the right thing,
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turning on and off lights when you leave,
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cleaning up the environment.
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And we went from robots that were right in the lab,
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but were both too expensive and not sufficiently capable
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to ever do an acceptable job of anything
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other than being a toy or a curio in your home
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to something that was both affordable
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and sufficiently effective to drive,
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be above threshold and drive purchase intent.
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Now we've disrupted the intent of the work
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and now we've disrupted the entire vacuuming industry.
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The number one selling vacuums, for example, in the US
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are Roombas, so not robot vacuums,
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but vacuums and that's really crazy and weird.
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We need to pause that, I mean, that's incredible.
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That's incredible that a robot
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is the number one selling thing that does something.
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Yep.
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Something as essential as vacuuming.
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So we're... Congratulations.
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Thank you.
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It's still kind of fun to say,
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but just because this was a crazy idea
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that just started in a room here,
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we're like, do you think we can do this?
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Hey, let's give it a try.
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But now the robots are starting
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to understand their environment.
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And if you think about the next step,
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there's two dimensions.
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I've been working so hard since the beginning of iRobot
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to make robots are autonomous,
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that they're smart enough and understand their task enough
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that they can just go do it without human involvement.
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Now what I'm really excited and working on
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is how do I make them less autonomous?
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Meaning that the robot is supposed to be your partner,
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not this automaton that just goes and does what a robot does.
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And so that if you tell it,
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hey, I just dropped some flour by the fridge in the kitchen.
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Can you deal with it?
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Wouldn't be awesome if the right thing just happened
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based on that utterance.
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And to some extent that's less autonomous
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because it's actually listening to you,
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understanding the context and intent of the sentence,
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mapping it against its understanding of the home it lives in
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and knowing what to do.
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And so that's an area of research.
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It's an area where we're starting to roll out features.
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You can now tell your robot to clean up the kitchen
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and it knows what the kitchen is and can do that.
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And that's sort of 1.0 of where we're going.
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The other cool thing is that
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we're starting to know where stuff is.
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And why is that important?
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Well, robots are supposed to have arms, right?
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Data had an arm, Rosie had an arm,
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Robbie the robot had an arm.
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I mean, robots are, you know,
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they are physical things that move around in an environment
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they're supposed to like do work.
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And if you think about it,
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if a robot doesn't know anything,
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where anything is, why should it have an arm?
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But with this new dawn of home understanding
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that we're starting to go enjoy,
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I know where the kitchen is.
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I might in the future know where the refrigerator is.
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I might, if I had an arm, be able to find the handle,
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open it and even get myself a beer.
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Obviously that's one of the true dreams of robotics
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is to have robots bringing us a beer
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while we watch television.
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But I think that that new category of tasks
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where physical manipulation, robot arms
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is just a popery of new opportunity and excitement.
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And you see humans as a crucial part of that.
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So you kind of mentioned that.
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And I personally find that a really compelling idea.
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I think full autonomy can only take us so far,
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especially in the home.
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So you see humans as helping the robot understand
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or give deeper meaning to the spatial information.
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Right, it's a partnership.
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The robot is supposed to operate according to descriptors
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that you would use to describe your own home.
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The robot is supposed to in lieu of better direction
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kind of go about its routine,
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which ought to be basically right
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and lead to a home maintained
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in a way that it's learned you like,
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but also be perpetually ready to take direction
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that would activate a different set of behaviors or actions
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to meet a current need
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to the extent it could actually perform that task.
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So I gotta ask you,
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I think this is a fundamental and a fascinating question
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because iRobot has been a successful company
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and a rare successful robotics company.
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So Anki, Gibo, Mayfield Robotics with a Robot Curry,
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SciFi Works, Rethink Robotics.
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These were robotics companies that were founded
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and run by brilliant people.
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But all very unfortunately, at least for us roboticists,
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and all went out of business recently.
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So why do you think they didn't last longer?
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Why do you think it is so hard
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to keep a robotics company alive?
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You know, I say this only partially in jest
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that back in the day before Roomba,
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you know, I was a high tech entrepreneur building robots,
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but it wasn't until I became a vacuum cleaner salesman
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that we had any success.
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So I mean, the point is technology alone
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doesn't equal a successful business.
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We need to go and find the compelling need
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where the robot that we're creating
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can deliver clearly more value
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to the end user than it costs.
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And this is not a marginal thing
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where you're looking at the skin, like, it's close.
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Maybe we can hold our breath and make it work.
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It's clearly more value than the cost of the robot
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to bring, you know, in the store.
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And I think that the challenge has been finding
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those businesses where that's true
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that's true in a sustainable fashion.
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You know, when you get into entertainment style things,
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you could be the cat's meow one year,
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but 85% of toys, regardless of their merit,
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fail to make it to their second season.
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It's just super hard to do so.
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And so that that's just a tough business.
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And there's been a lot of experimentation around
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what is the right type of social companion?
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What is the right robot in the home
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that is doing something other than tasks people do every week
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that they'd rather not do?
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And I'm not sure we've got it all figured out right.
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And so that you get brilliant roboticists
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with super interesting robots
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that ultimately don't quite have
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that magical user experience and thus the,
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that value benefit equation remains ambiguous.
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So you as somebody who dreams of robots,
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you know, changing the world,
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what's your estimate?
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Why, how big is the space of applications
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that fit the criteria that you just described
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where you can really demonstrate
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an obvious significant value
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over the alternative non robotic solution?
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Well, I think that we're just about none of the way
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to achieving the potential of robotics at home.
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But we have to do it in a really eyes wide open,
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honest fashion.
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And so another way to put that is the potential is infinite
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because we did take a few steps
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but you're saying those steps are just very initial steps.
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So the Roomba is a hugely successful product
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but you're saying that's just the very, very beginning.
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That's just the very, very beginning.
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It's the foot in the door.
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And, you know, I think I was lucky
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that in the early days of robotics,
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people would ask me, when are you gonna clean my floor?
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It was something that I grew up saying,
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I got all these really good ideas
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but everyone seems to want their floor clean.
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And so maybe we should do that.
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Yeah, your good ideas.
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Earn the right to do the next thing after that.
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So the good ideas have to match with the desire of the people
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and then the actual cost has to like the business,
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the financial aspect has to all match together.
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Yeah, during our partnership
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back a number of years ago with Johnson Wax,
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they would explain to me that they would go into homes
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and just watch how people lived
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and try to figure out what were they doing
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that they really didn't really like to do
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but they had to do it frequently enough
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that it was top of mind and understood as a burden.
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Hey, let's make a product
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or come up with a solution to make that pain point
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less challenging.
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And sometimes we do certain burdens so often as a society
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that we actually don't even realize,
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like it's actually hard to see
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that that burden is something that could be removed.
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So it does require just going into the home
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and staring at, wait, how do I actually live life?
link |
00:19:19.560
What are the pain points?
link |
00:19:21.080
Yeah, and it getting those insights is a lot harder
link |
00:19:26.400
than it would seem it should be in retrospect.
link |
00:19:29.360
So how hard on that point,
link |
00:19:33.120
I mean, one of the big challenges of robotics
link |
00:19:37.480
is driving the cost to something,
link |
00:19:40.240
driving the cost down to something
link |
00:19:42.240
that consumers, people would afford.
link |
00:19:45.680
So people would be less likely to buy a Roomba
link |
00:19:48.880
if it costs $500,000, right?
link |
00:19:52.280
Which is probably sort of what a Roomba would cost
link |
00:19:55.840
several decades ago.
link |
00:19:58.040
So how do you drive, which I mentioned is very difficult.
link |
00:20:02.200
How do you drive the cost of a Roomba
link |
00:20:04.200
or a robot down such that people would want to buy it?
link |
00:20:07.920
When I started building robots,
link |
00:20:09.720
the cost of the robot had a lot to do
link |
00:20:12.240
with the amount of time it took to build it.
link |
00:20:15.480
And so that we would build our robots out of aluminum,
link |
00:20:18.400
I would go spend my time in the machine shop
link |
00:20:21.160
on the milling machine,
link |
00:20:23.840
cutting out the parts and so forth.
link |
00:20:28.000
And then when we got into the toy industry,
link |
00:20:29.720
I realized that if we were building at scale,
link |
00:20:34.520
I could determine the cost of the Roomba
link |
00:20:36.000
instead of adding up all the hours to mill out the parts,
link |
00:20:38.920
but by weighing it.
link |
00:20:42.080
And that's liberating.
link |
00:20:44.200
You can say, wow, the world has just changed
link |
00:20:49.560
as I think about construction in a different way.
link |
00:20:53.160
The 3D CAD tools that are available to us today,
link |
00:20:56.880
the operating at scale where I can do tooling
link |
00:21:01.680
and injection mold, an arbitrarily complicated part,
link |
00:21:07.080
and the cost is going to be basically
link |
00:21:09.800
the weight of the plastic in that part
link |
00:21:13.920
is incredibly exciting and liberating
link |
00:21:16.360
and opens up all sorts of opportunities.
link |
00:21:18.560
And for the sensing part of it, where we are today
link |
00:21:23.560
is instead of trying to build skin,
link |
00:21:29.280
which is like really hard for a long time.
link |
00:21:31.440
I spent creating strategies and ideas
link |
00:21:38.240
around how could we duplicate the skin on the human body
link |
00:21:42.720
because it's such an amazing sensor.
link |
00:21:47.880
Instead of going down that path,
link |
00:21:49.600
why don't we focus on vision?
link |
00:21:54.000
And how many of the problems that face a robot
link |
00:22:00.080
trying to do real work could be solved
link |
00:22:04.880
with a cheap camera and a big ass computer?
link |
00:22:09.480
And Moore's Law continues to work.
link |
00:22:12.440
The cell phone industry, the mobile industry
link |
00:22:16.520
is giving us better and better tools
link |
00:22:18.800
that can run on these embedded computers.
link |
00:22:21.120
And I think we passed an important moment,
link |
00:22:26.600
maybe two years ago, where you could put
link |
00:22:32.760
machine vision capable processors on robots
link |
00:22:37.520
at consumer price points.
link |
00:22:39.640
And I was waiting for it to happen.
link |
00:22:43.040
We avoided putting lasers on our robots
link |
00:22:46.600
to do navigation and instead spent years researching
link |
00:22:51.840
how to do vision based navigation
link |
00:22:54.640
because you could just see it
link |
00:22:58.440
where these technology trends were going
link |
00:23:01.640
and between injection molded plastic
link |
00:23:05.880
and a camera with a computer
link |
00:23:08.040
capable of running machine learning
link |
00:23:10.840
and visual object recognition,
link |
00:23:12.560
I could build an incredibly affordable,
link |
00:23:15.560
incredibly capable robot
link |
00:23:18.760
and that's gonna be the future.
link |
00:23:21.240
So you know, on that point with a small tangent
link |
00:23:23.440
but I think an important one,
link |
00:23:25.000
another industry in which I would say
link |
00:23:27.600
the only other industry in which there is automation
link |
00:23:31.880
actually touching people's lives today
link |
00:23:34.840
is autonomous vehicles.
link |
00:23:37.640
What the vision is described of using computer vision
link |
00:23:42.360
and using cheap camera sensors,
link |
00:23:44.520
there's a debate on that of LiDAR versus computer vision
link |
00:23:48.320
and sort of the Elon Musk famously said
link |
00:23:53.320
that LiDAR is a crutch that really in the long term,
link |
00:23:58.440
camera only is the right solution
link |
00:24:00.880
which echoes some of the ideas you're expressing.
link |
00:24:03.520
Of course, the domain
link |
00:24:05.120
in terms of its safety criticality is different.
link |
00:24:07.720
But what do you think about that approach
link |
00:24:10.720
in the autonomous vehicle space?
link |
00:24:13.480
And in general, do you see a connection
link |
00:24:15.200
between the incredible real world challenges
link |
00:24:18.560
you have to solve in the home with Roomba
link |
00:24:20.800
and I saw a demonstration of some of them,
link |
00:24:23.000
corner cases literally and autonomous vehicles.
link |
00:24:27.920
So there's absolutely a tremendous overlap
link |
00:24:31.720
between both the problems, you know,
link |
00:24:35.520
a robot vacuum and autonomous vehicle are trying to solve
link |
00:24:38.680
and the tools and the types of sensors
link |
00:24:41.880
that are being applied in the pursuit of the solutions.
link |
00:24:48.040
In my world, my environment is actually much harder
link |
00:24:54.680
than the environment in automobile travels.
link |
00:24:57.320
We don't have roads, we have t shirts, we have steps,
link |
00:25:02.720
we have a near infinite number of patterns and colors
link |
00:25:07.120
and surface textures on the floor.
link |
00:25:10.200
Especially from a visual perspective.
link |
00:25:12.560
Yeah, visually it's really tough.
link |
00:25:14.760
Is an infinitely variable.
link |
00:25:18.880
On the other hand, safety is way easier on the inside.
link |
00:25:22.560
My robots, they're not very heavy,
link |
00:25:26.440
they're not very fast.
link |
00:25:28.280
If they bump into your foot, you think it's funny.
link |
00:25:32.720
And, you know, and autonomous vehicles
link |
00:25:36.920
kind of have the inverse problem.
link |
00:25:39.400
And so that for me saying vision is the future,
link |
00:25:45.920
I can say that without reservation.
link |
00:25:49.480
For autonomous vehicles, I think I believe what Elon's saying
link |
00:25:55.360
about the future is ultimately gonna be vision.
link |
00:25:59.040
Maybe if we put a cheap lighter on there
link |
00:26:01.000
as a backup sensor, it might not be the worst idea
link |
00:26:03.280
in the world.
link |
00:26:04.120
So the stakes are much higher.
link |
00:26:04.960
The stakes are much higher.
link |
00:26:05.800
You have to be much more careful thinking through
link |
00:26:08.200
how far away that future is.
link |
00:26:10.720
Right, but I think that the primary
link |
00:26:16.080
environmental understanding sensor
link |
00:26:19.320
is going to be a visual system.
link |
00:26:21.760
Visual system.
link |
00:26:23.000
So on that point, well, let me ask,
link |
00:26:25.560
do you hope there's an iRobot robot in every home
link |
00:26:29.440
in the world one day?
link |
00:26:31.880
I expect there to be at least one iRobot robot
link |
00:26:34.880
in every home.
link |
00:26:36.440
You know, we've sold 25 million robots.
link |
00:26:41.160
So we're in about 10% of US homes,
link |
00:26:44.600
which is a great start.
link |
00:26:47.120
But I think that when we think about the numbers
link |
00:26:51.080
of things that robots can do, you know,
link |
00:26:55.840
today I can vacuum your floor, mop your floor,
link |
00:26:58.560
cut your lawn or soon we'll be able to cut your lawn.
link |
00:27:01.240
But there are more things that we could do in the home.
link |
00:27:06.720
And I hope that we continue using the techniques
link |
00:27:11.520
I described around exploiting computer vision
link |
00:27:14.480
and low cost manufacturing that we'll be able
link |
00:27:18.680
to create these solutions at affordable price points.
link |
00:27:22.680
So let me ask, on that point of a robot in every home,
link |
00:27:25.600
that's my dream as well.
link |
00:27:26.880
I'd love to see that.
link |
00:27:28.400
I think the possibilities there are indeed
link |
00:27:31.880
infinite positive possibilities.
link |
00:27:34.560
But in our current culture, no thanks to science fiction
link |
00:27:39.800
and so on, there's a serious kind of hesitation
link |
00:27:44.720
and anxiety, concern about robots
link |
00:27:47.120
and also a concern about privacy.
link |
00:27:51.480
And it's a fascinating question to me
link |
00:27:54.040
why that concern is amongst a certain group of people
link |
00:27:59.600
is as intense as it is.
link |
00:28:02.880
So you have to think about it
link |
00:28:04.280
because it's a serious concern,
link |
00:28:05.520
but I wonder how you address it best.
link |
00:28:08.040
So from a perspective of a vision sensor,
link |
00:28:09.840
so robots that move about the home and sense the world,
link |
00:28:14.200
how do you alleviate people's privacy concerns?
link |
00:28:19.720
How do you make sure that they can trust iRobot
link |
00:28:22.880
and the robots that they share their home with?
link |
00:28:26.640
I think that's a great question.
link |
00:28:28.160
And we've really leaned way forward on this
link |
00:28:33.760
because given our vision as to the role the company
link |
00:28:38.880
intends to play in the home,
link |
00:28:43.000
really for us, make or break is,
link |
00:28:45.480
can our approach be trusted to protecting the data
link |
00:28:50.480
and the privacy of the people who have our robots?
link |
00:28:53.560
And so we've gone out publicly
link |
00:28:56.920
with a privacy manifesto stating we'll never sell your data.
link |
00:29:00.440
We've adopted GDPR, not just where GDPR is required,
link |
00:29:05.520
but globally, we have ensured that images
link |
00:29:16.640
don't leave the robot.
link |
00:29:18.080
So processing data from the visual sensors
link |
00:29:22.120
happens locally on the robot
link |
00:29:23.680
and only semantic knowledge of the home
link |
00:29:29.520
with the consumer's consent is sent up.
link |
00:29:32.720
We show you what we know
link |
00:29:34.480
and are trying to go use data as an enabler
link |
00:29:41.560
for the performance of the robots
link |
00:29:44.120
with the informed consent and understanding
link |
00:29:50.040
of the people who own those robots.
link |
00:29:52.440
And we take it very seriously.
link |
00:29:56.880
And ultimately, we think that by showing a customer
link |
00:30:01.880
that if you let us build a semantic map of your home
link |
00:30:07.360
and know where the rooms are,
link |
00:30:09.000
well, then you can say clean the kitchen.
link |
00:30:11.760
If you don't want the robot to do that,
link |
00:30:13.720
don't make the map,
link |
00:30:14.560
it'll do its best job cleaning your home,
link |
00:30:17.000
but it won't be able to do that.
link |
00:30:18.640
And if you ever want us to forget
link |
00:30:20.280
that we know that it's your kitchen,
link |
00:30:22.080
you can have confidence that we will do that for you.
link |
00:30:26.680
So we're trying to go and be a sort of a data 2.0
link |
00:30:34.520
perspective company where we treat the data
link |
00:30:37.680
that the robots have of the consumer's home
link |
00:30:40.800
as if it were the consumer's data
link |
00:30:43.200
and that they have rights to it.
link |
00:30:47.360
So we think by being the good guys on this front,
link |
00:30:50.960
we can build the trust and thus be entrusted
link |
00:30:55.120
to enable robots to do more things that are thoughtful.
link |
00:31:00.200
You think people's worries will diminish over time?
link |
00:31:04.520
As a society, broadly speaking,
link |
00:31:06.840
do you think you can win over trust,
link |
00:31:09.320
not just for the company,
link |
00:31:10.640
but just the comfort of people have with AI in their home
link |
00:31:14.880
enriching their lives in some way?
link |
00:31:17.040
I think we're an interesting place today
link |
00:31:19.560
where it's less about winning them over
link |
00:31:22.400
and more about finding a way to talk about privacy
link |
00:31:26.240
in a way that more people can understand.
link |
00:31:28.840
I would tell you that today,
link |
00:31:30.920
when there's a privacy breach,
link |
00:31:33.320
people get very upset and then go to the store
link |
00:31:37.040
and buy the cheapest thing,
link |
00:31:38.320
paying no attention to whether or not the products
link |
00:31:41.000
that they're buying honor privacy standards or not.
link |
00:31:44.640
In fact, if I put on the package of my Roomba,
link |
00:31:50.080
the privacy commitments that we have,
link |
00:31:53.640
I would sell less than I would if I did nothing at all
link |
00:31:58.720
and that needs to change.
link |
00:32:00.400
So it's not a question about earning trust.
link |
00:32:02.880
I think that's necessary but not sufficient.
link |
00:32:05.000
We need to figure out how to have a comfortable set
link |
00:32:08.440
of what is the grade A meat standard applied to privacy
link |
00:32:14.200
that customers can trust and understand
link |
00:32:18.400
and then use in the buying decisions.
link |
00:32:23.040
That will reward companies for good behavior
link |
00:32:25.520
and that will ultimately be how this moves forward.
link |
00:32:29.880
And maybe be part of the conversation
link |
00:32:32.680
between regular people about what it means,
link |
00:32:34.800
what privacy means.
link |
00:32:36.280
If you have some standards, you can say,
link |
00:32:38.400
you can start talking about who's following them,
link |
00:32:41.080
who's not, have more.
link |
00:32:42.680
Because most people are actually quite clueless
link |
00:32:45.440
about all aspects of artificial intelligence
link |
00:32:47.320
or data collection and so on.
link |
00:32:48.400
It would be nice to change that
link |
00:32:49.920
for people to understand the good that AI can do
link |
00:32:52.760
and it's not some system that's trying to steal
link |
00:32:56.520
all the most sensitive data.
link |
00:32:58.760
Do you think, do you dream of a Roomba
link |
00:33:02.640
with human level intelligence one day?
link |
00:33:05.240
So you've mentioned a very successful localization
link |
00:33:10.520
and mapping of the environment,
link |
00:33:11.880
being able to do some basic communication
link |
00:33:14.360
to say go clean the kitchen.
link |
00:33:16.560
Do you see in your maybe more bored moments,
link |
00:33:22.880
once you get the beer,
link |
00:33:24.840
just sit back with that beer
link |
00:33:27.000
and have a chat on a Friday night with the Roomba
link |
00:33:30.800
about how your day went.
link |
00:33:34.120
So through your latter question, absolutely.
link |
00:33:38.640
To your former question as to whether Roomba
link |
00:33:40.720
can have human level intelligence, not in my lifetime.
link |
00:33:45.200
You can have you, you can have a great conversation,
link |
00:33:49.680
a meaningful conversation with a robot
link |
00:33:53.920
without it having anything
link |
00:33:55.400
that resembles human level intelligence.
link |
00:33:57.760
And I think that as long as you realize
link |
00:34:02.800
that conversation is not about the robot
link |
00:34:06.360
and making the robot feel good.
link |
00:34:08.600
That conversation is about you learning interesting things
link |
00:34:14.880
that make you feel like the conversation
link |
00:34:18.400
that you had with the robot is
link |
00:34:23.800
a pretty awesome way of learning something.
link |
00:34:27.280
And it could be about what kind of day your pet had.
link |
00:34:30.800
It could be about, how can I make my home
link |
00:34:35.040
more energy efficient?
link |
00:34:36.160
It could be about, if I'm thinking about
link |
00:34:39.600
climbing Mount Everest, what should I know?
link |
00:34:44.320
And that's a very doable thing.
link |
00:34:48.600
But if I think that that conversation
link |
00:34:51.480
I'm gonna have with the robot is,
link |
00:34:53.640
I'm gonna be rewarded by making the robot happy.
link |
00:34:56.760
But I could have just put a button on the robot
link |
00:34:58.720
that you could push and the robot would smile
link |
00:35:00.280
and that sort of thing.
link |
00:35:02.120
So I think you need to think about the question
link |
00:35:04.160
in the right way.
link |
00:35:06.680
And robots can be awesomely effective
link |
00:35:11.520
at helping people feel less isolated,
link |
00:35:14.400
learn more about the home that they live in
link |
00:35:17.520
and fill some of those lonely gaps
link |
00:35:21.920
that we wish we were engaged
link |
00:35:23.760
learning cool stuff about our world.
link |
00:35:25.640
Last question, if you could hang out for a day
link |
00:35:30.640
with a robot from science fiction, movies, books
link |
00:35:34.640
and safely pick, safely pick its brain for that day,
link |
00:35:39.640
who would you pick?
link |
00:35:41.640
Data.
link |
00:35:42.640
Data.
link |
00:35:43.640
From Star Trek.
link |
00:35:44.640
I think that data is really smart.
link |
00:35:48.640
Data's been through a lot trying to go and save the galaxy
link |
00:35:52.640
and I'm really interested actually in emotion and robotics.
link |
00:35:58.640
And I think you'd have a lot to say about that
link |
00:36:00.640
because I believe actually that emotion plays
link |
00:36:05.640
an incredibly useful role in doing reasonable things
link |
00:36:11.640
in situations where we have imperfect understanding
link |
00:36:14.640
of what's going on.
link |
00:36:15.640
In social situations when there's imperfect information.
link |
00:36:18.640
In social situations also in competitive
link |
00:36:23.640
or dangerous situations,
link |
00:36:26.640
that we have emotion for a reason.
link |
00:36:30.640
And so that ultimately, my theory is that as robots
link |
00:36:35.640
get smarter and smarter,
link |
00:36:36.640
they're actually going to get more emotional
link |
00:36:38.640
because you can't actually survive on pure logic.
link |
00:36:46.640
Because only a very tiny fraction of the situations
link |
00:36:51.640
we find ourselves in can be resolved reasonably with logic.
link |
00:36:55.640
And so I think data would have a lot to say about that
link |
00:36:57.640
and so I could find out whether he agrees.
link |
00:36:59.640
What, if you could ask data one question
link |
00:37:02.640
and you would get a deep, honest answer to,
link |
00:37:05.640
what would you ask?
link |
00:37:06.640
What's Captain Picard really like?
link |
00:37:08.640
Okay, I think that's the perfect way to end the call
link |
00:37:12.640
and thank you so much for talking today.
link |
00:37:14.640
I really appreciate it.
link |
00:37:16.640
My pleasure.