Transcript for Colin Angle: iRobot

So the three laws are very thought-provoking and require such a profound understanding of the world a robot lives in the ramifications of its action and its own sense of self that It's not a relevant bar, at least it won't be a relevant bar for decades to come. If Rumba follows the three laws, and I believe it does, it is designed to help humans not hurt them. It's designed to be inherently safe, and we designed it to last a long time. It's not through any AI or intent on the robots part. It's because following the three laws is aligned with being a good robot product. So I guess it does. But it does. Not by explicit design.

We need robots to help us continue to improve our standard of living. We need robots because the average age of humanity is increasing very quickly and simply the number of people young enough and spry enough to care for the elder growing demographic is inadequate. And so what is the role of robots? Today the role is to make our lives a little easier, a little cleaner, maybe a little healthier. But in time, robots are going to be the difference between real gut-wrenching declines in our ability to live independently and maintain our standard of living. And a future that is the bright one where we have more control over lives, can spend more of our time focused on activities we choose. And I'm so honored and excited to be playing a role in that journey.

So I robot has sort of over the years narrowed in on the home, the consumers home as the place where we want to innovate and deliver tools that will help a home be a more automatically maintained place, a healthier place, a safer place, and perhaps even a more efficient place to be. And, you know, today we vacuum, we mop, soon we'll be mowing your lawn, but Where things are going is, when do we get to the point where the home? Not just the robots that live in your home, but the home itself becomes part of a system that maintains itself and plays an act of role in caring for and helping the people live in that home. And I see everything that we're doing as steps along the path toward that future.

Sure. So the goal is to make a home that takes care of itself, takes care of the people in the home, and gives the user an experience of just living their life in the home is somehow doing the right thing, turning on enough lights when you leave, cleaning up the environment and We went from robots that were right in the lab, but were both too expensive and not sufficiently capable to do an acceptable job of anything other than being a toy or a curio in your home to something that was both affordable and sufficiently effective to drive, you know, be above threshold and drive, purchase intent, Now, we've disrupted the entire vacuuming industry. The number one selling vacuums, for example, in the US are rumours, so not robot vacuums, but vacuums, and that's really crazy and weird.

So we're, we're, we're the regulations. And it still is kind of fun to say, but they just because this was a crazy idea that that just started, you know, in a room here, we're like, do you think we can do this? So, hey, let's give it a try. But, but now the robots are starting to understand their environment. And if you think about the next step, There's two dimensions. I've been working so hard since the beginning of I robot to make robots our autonomous that, you know, they're smart enough and understand their task enough that they can just go do it without human involvement. Now what I'm really excited and working on is how do I make a molest autonomous? meaning that the robot is supposed to be your partner, not this automaton that just goes and does what a robot does. And so that if you tell it, hey, I just dropped some flour by the fridge in the kitchen, can you deal with it? wouldn't be awesome if the writing just happened based on that utterance. And to some extent that's less autonomous because it's actually listening to you, understanding the context and intent of the sentence, mapping it against its understanding of the home it lives in and knowing what to do. And so that's an area of research. It's an area where we're starting to roll out features. You can now tell your robot to clean up the kitchen and it knows what the kitchen is and can do that. And that's sort of one point of where we're going. The other cool thing is that we're starting to know where stuff is. And why is that important? Well, Robots are supposed to have arms, right? Data had an arm, rosy had an arm, right? Robots are, you know, the physical things that move around in an environment. And they're supposed to like do work. And if you think about it, if a robot doesn't know anything, where anything is, why should it have an arm? But with this new dawn of home understanding that we're starting to go, enjoy I know where the kitchen is I might in the future know where the refrigerator is I might if I had an arm be able to find the handle open it and even get myself a beer obviously that's one of the true dreams of robotics is definitely bringing us a beer while we watch television but you know I think that that new category of tasks where physical manipulation, robot arms, is a just a popore of new opportunity and excitement.

Right. It's a partnership. The robot is supposed to operate according to descriptors that you would use to describe your own home. The robot is supposed to, in lieu of better direction, kind of go about its routine, which ought to be basically right and lead to a whole maintained in a way that it's learned you like, but also be perpetually ready to take direction that would activate a different Set of behaviors or actions to meet a current need to the extent it could actually perform that task.

You know, I say this only partially and just that back in the day before Rumba, you know, 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 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 this is not a marginal thing where you're looking at the skin. Like, it's close. Maybe we can hold our breath and make it work. It's clearly more value than the cost of the robot to bring in the store. And I think that the challenge has been finding those businesses where that's true in a sustainable fashion. when you get into entertainment style things you could be the cats me out 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's 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 roboticists with super interesting robots that ultimately don't quite have that magical user experience and thus the value benefit equation remains ambiguous.

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 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 are just very initial steps so the room was a hugely successful product but you're saying that's just the very very very beginning it's the food in the door and you know I think I was lucky that in the early days of of robotics people would ask me when are you going to 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. Yeah, you're good ideas. Earn the right to do the next thing after that.

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 understood as a burden hey let's make a product or come up with a solution to make that pain point less challenging.

Yeah, and it getting those insights is a lot harder than it would seem it should be in retrospect.

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 parts and so forth. And then when we got into the toy industry, I realized that If we were building at scale, I could determine the cost of the robin, 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 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, I spent creating strategies and ideas around how could we duplicate the skin on the human body because it's such an amazing sensor. 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 that consumer price points. And I was waiting for it to happen with avoided putting lasers on a robots to do navigation. And instead spent years researching how to do vision-based navigation because you could just see 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.

So there's absolutely a tremendous overlap between both the problems, you know, a robot vacuum in a ton of vehicles are trying to solve and the tools and the types of sensors that are being applied in the pursuit of the solutions. In my world, My environment is actually much harder than the environment in automobile travels. We don't have roads. We have t-shirts. We have steps. We have a near-infinite number of patterns and colors and surface textures on the floor. Especially from a visual perspective.

On the other hand, safety is way easier on the inside. My robots, they're not far you heavy, they're not very fast. If they bump into your foot, you think it's funny. And a ton of vehicles kind of have the inverse problem. And so that for me saying vision is the future, I can say that without reservations. For autonomous vehicles, I think I believe what Elon saying about the future is ultimately going to be vision. Maybe if we put a cheap lighter on there as a backup sensor, it might not be the worst idea in the world.

Right. But I think that the primary Environmental understanding sensor is going to be a visual system.

I expect there to be at least one iRobot robot in every home. You know, we've sold 25 million robots. So we're in about 10% of US homes, which is a great start. But I think that when we think about the numbers of things that robots can do, you know, today I can vacuum your floor, mop your floor, cut your lawn, or soon we'll be able to cut your lawn. But there are more things that we could do in the home. And I hope that we continue using the techniques I described around exploiting computer vision and low cost. Manufacturing that will be able to create these solutions at affordable price points.

I think that's a great question and we've really leaned way forward on this because given our vision as to the role the company intends to play in the home Really for us, Maker Break is, can our approach be trusted to protecting the data and the privacy of the people who have our robots? And so we've gone out publicly with the privacy manifesto stating, we'll never sell your data. We've adopted GDPR, not just where GDPR is required, but globally. We have ensured that any that images don't leave the robot. So processing data from the visual sensors happens locally on the robot and only semantic knowledge of the home with the consumers consent is sent up. We show you what we know and are trying to go use data as an enabler for the performance of the robots with the informed consent and understanding of the people who own those robots and you know we take it very seriously and ultimately we think that by showing a customer that You know, if you let us build a semantic map of your home and know where the rooms are, well, then you can say clean the kitchen. If you don't want to robot to do that, don't make the map. It'll do the best job cleaning your home, but I won't be able to do that. And if you ever want us to forget that we know that it's your kitchen, you can have confidence that we will do that for you. So we're trying to go and be sort of a data 2.0 perspective company where we treat the data that the robots have of the consumers home as if it were the consumers data and that they have rights to it. So we think by being the good guys on this front we can build the trust and thus be entrusted. to enable robots to do more things that are thoughtful.

I think we're an interesting place today, where it's less about winning them over and more about finding a way to talk about privacy in a way that more people can understand. I would tell you that today, when there's a privacy breach, people get very upset and then go to the store and buy the cheapest thing, paying no attention to whether or not the products that they're buying on or privacy standards are not. In fact, if I put on the package of my room, the privacy commitments that we have, I would sell less than I would if I did nothing at all. And that needs to change. So it's not a question about earning trust. I think that's necessary by not sufficient. We need to figure out how to have a comfortable set of what is the grade A meat standard applied to privacy that customers can trust and understand and then use in the buying decisions.

So, to your latter question, absolutely. To your former question as to whether robot can have human level intelligence, not in my lifetime. If I think you can have a great conversation, a meaningful conversation with a robot, without it having anything that resembles human level intelligence. And I think that as long as you realize that conversation is not about the robot, I'm making the robot feel good. That conversation is about you learning interesting things that make you feel like the conversation that you had with the robot is a pretty awesome way of learning something. And it could be about what kind of day your pet had. It could be about, you know, how can I make my home more energy efficient? It could be about, you know, if I'm thinking about climbing Mount Everest, what should I know? And that's a very doable thing. But if I think that that conversation and I have with the robot is, I'm going to be rewarded by making the robot happy, but I could have just put a button on the robot that you can push in the robot with smile and that sort of thing. So I think you need to think about the question in the right way and robots can be possibly effective at helping people feel less isolated, learn more about the home that they live in, and fill some of those lonely gaps that we wish we were engaged learning cool stuff about our world.

data from Star Trek. I think that a data is really smart. Data has been through a lot trying to go and save the galaxy and I'm really interested actually in emotion and robotics and I think you'd have a lot to say about that because I believe actually that A motion plays an incredibly useful role in doing reasonable things in situations where we have imperfect understanding of what's going on in social situations when there's been perfect information. In social situations also in competitive or dangerous situations. that we have a motion for reason and so that ultimately this my theory is that as robots get smart and smarter they're actually going to get more emotional because you can't actually survive on pure logic because only a very tiny fraction of the situations he find ourselves and can be resolved reasonably with logic. And so I think data would have a lot to say about that and so I can find out whether he agrees.

What's Captain Picard really like?

My pleasure.