Colin Angle
Colin Angle
iRobot Corporation is an American advanced technology company founded in 1990 by three MIT graduates who designed war robots. Now incorporated in Delaware, the company builds robots such as military and police robots, such as the PackBot along with autonomous home vacuum cleaner, the Scooba that scrubs and cleans hard floors...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
ask kids pull robot talk teenager typical walks
If you ask the typical two- or three-year-old or a teenager what a robot is, they will think about a humanoid that does my homework for me or walks the dog. When I go and talk to kids and pull out the Roomba, it's not this big 'Wow!' moment.
continuous created expensive inventions legs nature robot walks wonderful
Building a robot that has legs and walks around is a very expensive proposition. Mother Nature has created many wonderful things, but one thing we do have that nature doesn't is the wheel, a continuous rotating joint, and tracks, so we need to make use of inventions to make things simpler.
wildly
It's wildly impractical to do so in any real sense.
cleaning embraced felt robot
We felt that if we could do it at the right price, the cleaning robot would be embraced by the masses.
human
What did everyone think robot vacuuming was going to be? Well, they think Rosie the Robot from 'The Jetsons,' a human robot that pushed a vacuum. That was never going to happen.
floors home robot vacuum
You're not going to talk to your vacuum cleaning robot: in fact, you may never see your vacuum cleaning robot because, ideally, you come home every day and your floors are freshly vacuumed.
critical simplicity
The simplicity of the interaction is one of the most critical things.
age creating early grew mostly
I grew up mostly in Schenectady, N.Y. From an early age, building and creating things was a real passion for me.
cell consumer core robot strong synergy ultimately
There is strong synergy with consumer electronics. The core of a robot could ultimately be a cell phone.
connect designed function home legs meet name people robots supposed unreliable
We're going to have robots in the home, but they're not going to be walking. Legs are complicated, unreliable and costly. Robots are going to look and be designed to meet the function they're supposed to perform. People will still name them and connect with them.
build platform reliable stuff
If you want to make a serious, rugged, reliable robot, you can start with the Create platform and just build stuff on top of it.
opportunity people cost
In the end, robots do things that people can do. So there is a cost above which you can hire somebody to do it, and that bounds the opportunity.
ideas likes hollywood
Hollywood likes to imagine robots as mechanical copies of ourselves - which is a terrible idea.
people robots building
Building robot versions of people is very expensive.