On The Precipice of The Golden Age of Robotics
Yesterday, I had the incredible honor of being inducted into the Consumer Technology Association Hall of Fame. What it took to get inducted is as much the story of the incredibly bright and innovative people of iRobot as it is my own. The honor not only gave me an opportunity to reflect on the accomplishments of the people of iRobot, but also consider what lays ahead of us in the world of robotics. Because the truth is that we’re just about none of the way to achieving the potential of robots in consumers’ homes.
Today the toolkit for creating robots that can create real value for customers is just radically better. When we first started iRobot, spatial navigation was a robot problem. Voice recognition was a robot problem. Machine vision was a robot problem. So, if we wanted to create a robot with these capabilities, we had to invent them.
Today… it’s so much different.
With consumer devices like Amazon Alexa and Google Home – voice recognition is no longer a robot problem. Amazon and Google solved it for us.
With incredibly cheap, yet powerful cameras, tools like machine learning, and the ability to leverage cloud computing to crunch giant sets of data – computer vision is no longer a problem we had to solve on our own. So many more companies today have a vested interested in seeing that problem solved!
And with computer vision and the ubiquity of connectivity, the ability for a robot to know precisely where it is while it’s navigating a consumer’s home is no longer an obstacle.
So just think about it now: today, we have robots in consumers’ homes who know precisely where they are in a home. They can navigate from room to room, identifying objects in those rooms as they go. We can talk to them, tell them where to go, and what to do.
So what’s next in robotics?
How about, “3PO, turn off all the lights in rooms that don’t have people in them”
How about, “Rosie, fold the laundry”
How about, “Robbie, go get me a beer”
Today the landscape is coming alive with possibility. And if we can marry that imagination with good business models, continued partnerships, and an intense focus on customers… I believe we’re on the precipice of golden age of consumer robotics right now.
Senior Partner @ SOSV | ben@sosv.com | $1.5B AUM | Climate, Health, Industry | Programs: IndieBio, HAX | AI Vibe Coding Educator
5yMay the qi be with you for your induction! For future robots, humanoid ones seem to always fail (2 good arms are still expensive), and most people won't get a Spot Mini in their home either. It seems industry/agri/service robots will boom way before home robots. I'm still curious to see which is the next robot to enter the house at scale! (one could argue smart ovens are robots, but we won't go there...)
Xplor™ Lifetime-Achievement-Award @ Xplor International | Breakthrough Innovations
5yCongratulations Colin, well deserved. Your efforts certainly created a major advance in the technology and know how to provide Autonomous solutions to humanity. Would love to participate in a brainstorming session with you that roadmaps the critical issues challenging mankind. As you said we have a 1000 times more technical solutions immediately available today. Drag & Drop, Plug & Play can quickly produce solutions to critical problems. Keep up the good work and your contribution to society. Well done.
| Marketing | Product Management | Business Development
5yCongratulations on the induction! I feel that as the smart home ideas start to become a reality, the role of robots will (at least in the near-term) be alleviating undesirable home activities and chores. ie. Vacuuming, mowing the lawn, shoveling snow, cleaning gutters, etc. with each chore having a robot designed to address it, and home control will be centralized. The questions then being... What can further be automated via dedicated robotics? What data (navigation and otherwise) that is acquired by these robots can be sent upward to software that oversees the overall house control to provide the most impact?
Do your readers know who Rosie is anymore?
Maybe we should think more about how.to price can help solve global challenges and weight the user's comfort versus the CO2 consumed by the manufacture and use of robots for tasks most of us can do without effort. Hey, fold your own laundry and get yourself a beer.