“I believe one day nano-robots will play an important role in medicine.”
“I grew up mostly in Schenectady, N.Y. From an early age, building and creating things was a real passion for me.”
“I thought boxes were the best toy. When my parents got a new car, I ran to my mother and said, 'Did it come in a box?'”
“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.”
“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.”
“People are fascinated by robots because they're machines that can mimic life.”
“The name iRobot comes from 'Internet-connected robot.'”
“Around the late 1990s, I'd become convinced that one of the killer applications of robotics came from connecting robots to the Internet. The idea of solving generalized artificial intelligence was still far away, but heck, I could rent brains by hiring operators. iRobot was the name of the company and one of our most ambitious projects, iRobot LE.”
“At MIT, in Professor Rodney Brooks' lab, I was involved in a project, led by Anita Flynn, to build robots using techniques similar to those used in building silicon chips. We got some silicon micro-machined motors to move a bit, but this didn't lead to an actual product.”
“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.”