Colin Angle: iRobot CEO | Lex Fridman Podcast #39
the following is a conversation with Colin angle he's the CEO and co-founder of iRobot a robotics company that for 29 years has been creating robots that operate successfully in the real world not as a demo or on a scale of dozens but on a scale of thousands and millions as of this year iRobot has sold more than 25 million robots to consumers including the Roomba vacuum cleaning robot the Bravo floor mopping robot and soon the Terra lawn-mowing robot 29 million robots successfully operating autonomously in real people's homes to me is an incredible accomplishment of science engineering logistics and all kinds of general entrepreneurial innovation most robotics companies fail iRobot has survived and succeeded for 29 years I spent all day at iRobot including a long tour and conversation with Colin about the history of iRobot and then sat down for this podcast conversation that would have been much longer if I didn't spend all day learning about and playing with the various robots in the company's history I'll release the video of the tour separately Colin iRobot its founding team its current team and its mission has been and continues to be an inspiration to me and thousands of engineers who are working hard to create AI systems that help real people this is the artificial intelligence podcast if you enjoy it subscribe on YouTube give it five stars and iTunes supported on patreon or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lux Friedman spelled Fri D ma a.m. and now here's my conversation with Colin angle in his 1942 short story runaround from his iRobot collection as a Asimov proposed the Three Laws of Robotics in order don't harm humans obey orders protect yourself so two questions first does the Roomba follow these three laws and also more seriously what role do you hope to see robots take in modern society in the future world 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 and so if Roomba follows the three laws and I believe it does you know it is designed to help humans not hurt them it's designed to be inherently safe and we design 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 um so I guess it does but it does by not by explicit design so then the bigger picture well what role do you hope to see robotics robots take in our what's currently mostly a world of humans 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 of our lives can spend more of our time focused on activities we choose and so honored and excited to be playing a role in that journey so you give me a tour it showed me some of the long histories now 29 years that I iRobot has been at it creating some incredible robots who showed me Pat bot he showed me a bunch of other stuff that led up to Roomba that led to Brava and Terra so let's skip that incredible history in the interest of time because we already talked about it I'll show this incredible footage you mentioned elderly and robotics and society I think the home is a fascinating place for robots to be so where do you see robots in the home currently I would say once again probably most homes in the world don't have a robot so how do you see that changing woody things the big initial value add that robots can do so iRobot 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 we'll 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 active role in caring for and helping the people who live in that home and I see everything that we're doing as steps along the path toward that future so what are the what are the steps so if we can summarize some of the history of Roomba the you've mentioned and maybe you can elaborate on it but you mentioned that the early days were really taking a robot from something that works either in the lab or something that works in the field that helps soldiers do the difficult work they do to actually be in the hands of consumers and tens of thousands hundreds of thousands robots that don't break down over how much people love them over months of very extensive use so that was the big first step and then the second big step was the ability to sense the environment to build a map to localize to be able to build a picture of the home that the human can then attach labels to in terms of you know giving some semantic knowledge to the robot about its environment okay so that's like a huge two big huge steps now maybe you can comment on them but also what is the the the next step of of making a robot part of the home sure so the goal is to make a home that that takes care of itself takes care of the people in the home and gives a user and experience of just living their life in the home is somehow doing the right thing lights when you leave cleaning up the environment and we went from robots that were great in the lab but we're both too expensive and not sufficiently capable to ever do an acceptable job of anything other than being a toy or curio in your home to something that was both affordable and sufficiently effective to drive you know be a threshold and drive purchase intent now we've disrupted the entire vacuuming industry the number one selling vacuums for example in the u.s. our room bows so not robot vacuums but vacuums and that's really crazy and weird and yes we need to pause and that's incredible that's this is incredible that a robot is this is the number one selling thing that does something yep everything as essential as vacuuming so we're it's still 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 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 iRobot to make robots are autonomous that you know they're smart enough and understand their task enough they they can just go do it without human involvement now what I'm really excited and working on is how do I make them less 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 flower by the fridge in the kitchen not can you deal with it wouldn't be awesome if the right thing 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 1.0 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 Rosie had an arm yeah Robbie the robot Hatter I mean brother you know they are physical things that move her around in an environment they're supposed to like do work yeah 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 refrigerators I might if I had an arm be able to find the hand I'll open it and even get myself a beer obviously that's one of the true dreams of robotics as Deb robots bringing us a beer while we watch television but um you know I think that that new category of tasks where physical manipulation robot arms is a just a potpourri of new opportunity and excitement and you see humans as a crucial part of that so you kind of mentioned that and I personally find that a really compelling idea I think full autonomy can only take us so far especially in the home so you see humans is helping the robot understand or give deeper meaning to the spatial information right it's 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 home 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 so I gotta ask you I think this is a fundamental and fascinating question because iRobot has been a successful company and a rare successful robotics company so Anki geebo Mayfield robotics with a robot curry sci-fi works rethink robotics these were robotics companies that were founded and run by brilliant people but all very unfortunately for at least for us roboticists that and all went out of business recently so why do you think they didn't last longer why do you think it is so hard to keep a robotics company alive you know I say this only partially in jest that back in the day before Roomba you know I was a 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 though I mean 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 it's this is not a marginal thing where you're looking at the skin like it's closed maybe we can hold our breath and make it work it's clearly more value than the the cost of the robot to bring you know in the store and I think that the challenge has been finding those businesses where that's true in a sustainable fashion you know the the when you get into entertainment style things you could be the cat's meow 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 have 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 roboticist with super interesting robots that ultimately don't quite have that magical user experience and thus the that value benefit equation remains ambiguous so you as somebody who dreams of robots you know changing the world what's your estimate why how big is the space of applications that fit the criteria that you just described where you can really demonstrate an obvious significant value over the alternative non robot bought a solution 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 is just very initial steps so the Rumba is a hugely successful product but you're saying that's just the very very just the very very beginning it's the foot in the door and you know I think I was lucky that in the early days of robotics people would ask me when are you gonna 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 Betty your good ideas earned the right to do the next thing after that so the good ideas have to match with the desire of the people and then the actual cost has to like the business the financial aspect has to all mash together yeah I during our partnership back a number of years ago 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 and understood as a a burden hey let's make a product or come up with a solution to make that pain point lesyk less challenging and sometimes we do certain burdens so often as a society that we actually don't even realize like it's actually hard to see that that burden is something that could be removed so it does require just going into the home and staring it wait how do I actually live life what are the pain points yeah and it getting those insights is a lot harder than it would seem it should be in retrospect so how hard on that point I mean one of the big challenges of robotics is driving the cost to something driving the cost down to something that consumers people would afford so people would be less likely to buy a Roomba for cost $500,000 right which is probably sort of what a Roomba would costs several decades ago so how do you drive which I mention is very difficult how do you drive the cost of a Roomba or a robot down such that people wouldn't want to buy it 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 the the parts and 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 rope 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 is 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 spent creating strategies and and ideas around how could we duplicate the skin on the human body because it's such an amazing sensor the 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 at consumer price points and I was waiting for it happed to happen we avoided putting lasers on our robots to do navigation and instead spent years researching how to do vision based navigation because you could just see it 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 gonna be the future you know on that point with a small tangent but I think an important one another industry in which I would say the only other industry in which they're true there is automation actually touching people's lives today is autonomous vehicles mm-hmm what the vision each is described of using computer vision and using cheap camera sensors that's there's a debate on that of lidar versus computer vision and sort of the Elon Musk famously said that lidar is a crutch that really in camera in the long term camera only is the right solution which echoes some of the ideas you're expressing of course in terms of its safety criticality is different but what do you think about that approach in the autonomous vehicle space and in general do you see a connection between the incredible real-world challenges you have to solve in the home with Roomba and I saw a demonstration of some of them corner cases literally and autonomous vehicles so there's absolutely a tremendous overlap between both the problems you know a robot vacuum and a Thomas vehicle 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 and automobile travel 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 yeah wait William looks it's really tough is an infinitely variable 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 you know and autonomous vehicles kind of have the inverse problem and so that for me saying vision is the future I can say that without reservation for autonomous vehicles I think I believe what you know I'm 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 so the something so much hi thanks so much higher that's you much more careful thinking through how far away that feature is right right and but I think that the primary environmental understanding sensor is going to be a visual system visual system so on that point well let me ask do you hope there's an AI robot robot in every home in the world one day I expect there to be at least when I robot robot in every home you know we've we've sold 25 million robots so we're in about 10 percent 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 we'll be able to create these solutions at affordable price points so let me ask on that point of a robot in every home that's my dream as well I'd love love to see that I you know I think the possibilities there are indeed infinite positive possibilities but you know in our current culture no thanks to science fiction and so on there's a serious kind of hesitation anxiety concern about robots and also a concern about privacy and it's a fascinating question to me why that concern is amongst a certain group of people as as intense as it is so you have to think about it because it's a serious concern but I wonder how you address it best so from a perspective of a vision sensor so robots that move about the home and sense the world how do how do you alleviate people's privacy concerns how do you make sure that they can trust iRobot and the robots that they share their home with 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 make-or-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 the privacy manifesto stating we'll never sell your data we've adopted GDP are not just where GDP are 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 its best job cleaning your home but it 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 a sort of a data 2.0 perspective company where we treat the data that the robots average 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 you think people's worries will diminish over time as a society broadly speaking do you think you can win over trust not just for the company but just the comfort of people have with AI in their home enriching their lives in some way I think we're an interesting place today we're 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 then go to the store and buy the cheapest thing paying no attention to whether or not the products that they're buying honor privacy standards or not in fact if I put on the package of my Roomba 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 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 meet standard applied to privacy that customers can trust and understand and then use in the buying decisions that will reward companies for good behavior and that will ultimately be how this moves forward and maybe be part of the conversation between regular people about what it means what privacy means if you have some standards you can say you're gonna start talking about who's following them who's not have more because most people are actually quite clueless about all aspects of artificial intelligence of data collection so on it would be nice to change that for people to understand the good that AI can do and it's not some some system that's trying to steal all the most sensitive data yep do you think do you dream of a Roomba with human level intelligence one day so you've mentioned a very successful localization and mapping of the environment being able to do some basic communication to say go clean the kitchen do you see and you're maybe more bored moments once you get the beer to sit back with that beer and have a chat on a Friday night with the Roomba about how your day one so true your latter question absolutely - your former question as to whether robot can have human level intelligence not my lifetime you can have you 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 and making the robot feel good that conversation is about you learning interesting things that make you feel like the conversation that you had with a 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 you know but if I think that that conversation gonna have of the robot is I'm gonna be rewarded by making the robot happy but I couldn't have just put a button on the robot you could push in the robot would smile and that sort of thing so I think you need to think about the question in the the right way and and robots can be awesomely 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 last question if you could hang out for a day with a robot from science fiction movies books and safely pick safely pick its brain for that day who would you pick data data from Star Trek I think that a data is really smart data's been through a lot trying to go and save the galaxy and I'm really interested actually in emotion and robotics and I think he'd have a lot to say about that because I believe actually that emotion play is an incredibly useful role in doing reasonable things in situations where I have imperfect understanding of what's going on in social situations on there's been perfect information in social situations also in competitive or dangerous situations that we have a motion for a 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 you 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 could find out whether he agrees what if you could ask data one question you would get a deep honest answer to what would you ask what's Captain Picard really like okay I think that's the perfect way to end the call and thank you so much for talking today I really appreciate it my pleasure you