In 30 seconds
Colin Angle argues that technology alone does not make a robotics business: the robot has to deliver clearly more value than it costs, in a sustainable way. He explains how iRobot found that need in floor cleaning, and how injection-molded plastic and cheap vision-capable computers now make capable consumer robots affordable.
- 1Technology alone does not equal a successful businessAngle jokes that his robotics company only found success once he became a "vacuum cleaner salesman" and went looking for a compelling need.
- 2The robot must clearly deliver more value than it costs, and not marginally so. Angle says the hard part is finding businesses where that holds in a sustainable fashion.
- 3Entertainment robots face brutal oddsAngle cites the statistic that 85% of toys, regardless of merit, fail to make it to a second season.
- 4Good ideas have to match what people actually wantEarly on, people kept asking Angle when his robots would clean their floors, and that demand earned iRobot the right to do the next thing.
- 5Scale changed how cost is calculatedOnce parts are injection molded, the cost is basically the weight of the plastic, not the hours spent at a milling machine.
- 6Vision beat artificial skinInstead of trying to duplicate human skin, iRobot bet that a cheap camera and a powerful computer could solve many of the problems a working robot faces.
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Brilliant robots die when the value-for-cost equation stays ambiguous
Lex Fridman opens by pointing out how rare iRobot is. Several robotics companies founded and run by brilliant people, including Anki, Jibo, SCI-FI Works and Rethink Robotics, have gone out of business, and he asks why it is so hard to keep one alive.
Angle answers partly in jest. Back before the Roomba he was a high-tech entrepreneur building robots, but the company only had real success once he became a vacuum cleaner salesman. His point is that technology alone does not make a business: you have to find a compelling need where the robot clearly delivers more value to the end user than it costs.
He stresses that this cannot be a marginal call where customers hold their breath and make it work. The value has to clearly exceed the price of the robot when it sits on the store shelf. The challenge for the industry, in his view, has been finding businesses where that is true in a sustainable fashion.
Entertainment and social robots are a tough place to build a lasting company
Angle says entertainment-style products are especially risky. A product can be the cat's meow one year, but 85% of toys, whatever their merit, fail to reach a second season. That makes it a tough business to sustain.
He notes that there has been a lot of experimentation around the right kind of social companion, and around robots in the home that do something other than chores people would rather not do each week. He is not sure the industry has it all figured out. The result is brilliant roboticists building interesting robots that lack a magical user experience, so the value-versus-cost equation stays ambiguous.
Fridman asks how large the space of qualifying applications is. Angle says the industry is about none of the way to the potential of robotics at home, but that it has to proceed with eyes open and honest. Put another way, the potential is infinite because only a few initial steps have been taken.
Watch how people live to find the burdens robots can remove
Fridman calls the Roomba a foot in the door. Angle agrees and says he was lucky: in the early days of robotics, people kept asking him when he would clean their floors. Everyone seemed to want a clean floor, so that idea earned iRobot the right to do the next thing.
Angle recalls a partnership years ago with Johnson Wax. The company's researchers would go into homes and watch how people lived, looking for chores that people dislike but do often enough that they stay top of mind as a burden. The goal was a product that would ease that pain point.
Fridman adds that society sometimes performs certain burdens so often that people no longer see them as something that could be removed. That is why the work requires going into the home and observing daily life. Angle agrees that getting those insights is much harder than it seems it should be in retrospect.
Plastic and cheap cameras made capable robots affordable
Fridman notes that cost is a core challenge: people would not buy a Roomba at a price like the $500,000 he imagines it would have cost decades ago. Angle explains that when he started building robots, cost depended on the time it took to build them. His were made of aluminum, and he spent his hours cutting parts on a milling machine.
Working in the toy industry changed his view. At scale, he could estimate a robot's cost by weighing it instead of adding up machining hours. He calls this liberating, since modern 3D CAD tools and injection molding let him tool an arbitrarily complicated part whose cost is basically the weight of its plastic.
On sensing, Angle says iRobot spent a long time on strategies for duplicating the human skin, an amazing sensor, but chose to focus on vision instead. The question became how many problems facing a working robot could be solved with a cheap camera and a big computer. Moore's Law and the mobile industry keep supplying better tools for embedded computers.
Angle says that about two years before the conversation, machine-vision-capable processors became possible at consumer price points, a moment he had been waiting for. iRobot had avoided putting lasers on its robots for navigation and spent years researching vision-based navigation, because the technology trends pointed that way. Combining molded plastic with a camera and a computer that can run machine learning and visual object recognition, he says, makes an affordable and capable robot, and that is the future.
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