 Hi, I'm Paul Miller with The Verge. I'm here with Mark Cipetta, the Vice President of Advanced Development at iRobot, and you built Ava, is that correct? That is correct. With your own bare hands, right? Not exactly, but... But this is a hand-built prototype of a mobile robotics platform. Absolutely. What is Ava? So Ava is the world's first practical robot app development platform. She takes the best innovations from the mobile computing space, from the electronic gaming space, and of course the mobile robots industry, and brings them together to bring robot app development to the iOS and Android developer communities. So there's a lot of technology on here, but what you guys want to emphasize is the apps that can be enabled by this? Yeah, so application development is definitely one of the key missions of this robot, you know, exploring new market opportunities for us internally, and developing partnerships to solve some practical robotics problems, but we're also using this platform to continue to move the state of the art in robot navigation through real world environments. Right. So you guys are working, you guys have a partnership with Google, right, for app development? That's correct. How is that going? What's happening there? There's a couple robots out there that are having applications developed for them. So Google has a couple of Avas? Yeah, that's correct. And what are they working on there? You know, I really am not sure. Android? I think, yes, Android, and I think they're sort of exploring the space at the moment. And are you working with other developers that are just trying to figure out where they can fit in? So, you know, right now we just struck a partnership with In Touch Health to bring a derivative of this platform into the healthcare space to allow doctors to do remote patient monitoring and rounding. Is that research, or is that a product that you guys are working on to deliver? No, that's geared towards product development. Okay. So let's just talk about Ava. You mentioned it's got a, this is basically a Kinect sensor, what is it? It's the pure? That's correct. It's a prime sensor. Prime sensor, okay. There are actually two of them. And the prime sensors are depth imaging cameras as well as RGB panning. Where's the other one? The second one is under the shoulder, and it pans back and forth, and it looks at the volume in front of the robot. So it's like an IR sensor, but it's just panning. So it's another Kinect, or Kinect type of sensor. Oh, there it is. It's like way under. Okay, I get it. So it's designed to develop situational awareness and to avoid obstacles that are in front of it. Now, you guys were developing this like about two years ago when you started? Yeah, we started around March of 2010. Was this even available to you at that point? The platform itself? No, these sensors. Yes, it was, but in prototype form, because the Kinect hadn't been out yet. Right, right. So you guys had that pretty early. And it seems like, for the hacker community, that's been such an enabling technology. But it's so cool. I mean, even iRobot is using this sort of technology. Yeah, iRobot is, we have a number of core competencies, one being mobile robot navigation, another one being building practical products. We also develop our own sensors in-house, but that's a shared competency. We are always looking outside to see what the latest in high fidelity sensing is around. So for example, this has a long range scanning laser range finder. And it's based that it's used for localization and mapping as well. And it's got some sonar in there? Yes, it has upward looking ultrasonic sensors to prevent the robot from decapitating itself on a table. Well, we got the, that's a smart, that's a good one. And we got to play around with it outside. I mean, it's, you know, with the break, collision, avoidance. And you guys have an app here. You can just point to where you want it to go and it goes there. That's correct. There's a number of ways to get your input into the system. One is there's a map. You can click on the map and the robot will autonomously plan a path to whatever that point is. It can put the two string points together to make like patrol paths. You can also click in a video image and it'll go to where you click in the image. You can control the individual degrees of freedom by touching on the image if I wanted to make it say no way or, you know, or she also responds to direct touch as well. So like I can like, and it'll look at me, what was it? If you do that, she'll turn. And then tap her. Goes the direction. She'll turn towards you. Oh, that's the one. I was doing this so well before, I promise. And obviously you can, if you bump into it with those pads down there, she'll stop, blush. That's correct. And but this is, this isn't how users are going to control this. You want app developers to have access to this and use that to navigate? Yeah, absolutely. We've created an API and we've exposed it to the face device, which in this case happens to be an iPad but can just as easily be an Android tablet. And you know, the sky's the limit, right? This is a very robust, safe, and you saw it move. It's very swift, you know, navigation platform that is equally at home in a home environment, in a business environment, or even in a healthcare institution. The operating around people and accomplishing its mission, getting from point A to point B is, you know, it's state of the art. It does its own path finding. Absolutely. It'll plan its own path and using the, it's a knowledge of the world and a map that it's created by itself. So it does create that, like, now right now you guys kind of have to like set it up a little bit, but will it be able to just dynamically generate its own map for things? Yeah, absolutely. We're working on autonomous exploration as an example in the research space so that, you know, you could pull a robot out of a box and, you know, fire up an app and say map and it'll drive around your home and, or in your office space and will create the map on its own. And you know, this is an engineering development tool right here, so it's not very pretty. Right. Obviously the maps can be post-processed to give the user, you know, a really nice looking user interface. And you guys are doing stuff, this is similar to your military robots. It can follow you, is that correct? That's correct. Yeah, this robot does person detection and person following. Like face recognition? Not facial recognition, but it looks at the upper torso in the case of this robot and identifies that it's a human being and then can either follow you or go away from you or, you know, whatever it's programmed to do. So what's next for Ava? Is this early development? Where would you say you are right now? I'd say it's market exploration, early partnership development and, you know, a continuing technology development for us. And what's next, you know, greater exposure to the developer communities would be, is of importance to us. Is that a messaging thing for you guys or is there stuff that you need to do to be ready for a lot more developers to get involved? I think we're building the groundwork to engage with greater numbers of developers, so there's still a little bit of work to be done there. And we have limited numbers of these prototype platforms now. Soon there'll be derivatives right in the marketplace under the InTouch agreement. Wait, can you explain that a little bit? Sure. We signed an agreement with InTouch Health earlier today. In the year, yeah, to develop our own. And that will be in the market when? We're not saying exactly when it'll be in the market, but we're in joint development right now. Okay, great. And is what comes in the market going to look like this? I think you'll see the family resemblance, but it won't look exactly like this. Will it have limbs? I would say that one will not have limbs, but... The Health one? The Health one will not have limbs. But are you guys looking into that, researching that? Yeah, we have a lot of manipulation development that's happening in-house, research. And right now, the problem of going through cluttered environments safely is solved. And it's solved in a way that's obviously good enough for highly cluttered, even small environments. So you can imagine next steps would be, okay, now I can get from point A to point B. If somebody puts a meal tray on me and tells me to bring it into the family room, it'll do it. Right. But it can't manipulate the world yet itself. So then the goal is for it to be able to do that? That's just one possible application that could be developed with the right hardware. With the right hardware. That seems like the... That's been a... For a consumer robot, outside of these single-purpose ones you've done with Roomba and the gutter one... Yeah, Luge. Yeah. The idea that a robot could go to the fridge, get out a beverage of your choice and bring it back to you. I mean, that's kind of like the idea... Milk. A soft drink. Exactly. That's kind of been the... I don't know, for some reason that stuck in my mind as where consumer robotics need to go for someone to spend what this would cost to get it in their home. Single-purpose robots are like with the Roomba, obviously have great utility. We have a vision of an automated home where an Ava-type robot is the focal point. And it's there to interact with humans so that the humans don't have to interact with the other application-specific robots. So this robot is here to command the other robots, to serve you, and it's also here to directly serve you in that vision. So absolutely going in, fetching and carrying things for you, allowing you to be somewhere where you're not physically delivering content to you through web connection and a tablet or computer. So those are all potential applications. And are some of the barriers there the actual technical complications or are some of them the cost implications of bringing something like that to consumers? That's a great question. So we're the leader of the practical robotic space and you won't see iRobot more than likely release a product that doesn't have a very high benefit to cost ratio. So the Roomba is, for what it can do, it's priced reasonably low. It's really both. There's still technology development that needs to happen and also there needs to be market pull. There needs to be a practical problem that needs to get solved at a price point that we think we can solve it in for us to bring a product derivative of this to market. People didn't think they needed a Roomba before you had the Roomba, right? That's a classic problem in the field of mobile robotics. In the early days, over the last 20 years, folks would call mobile robotics solutions running around looking for problems. And the Roomba was really the first problem that customers had, that they knew they had, they just had a different way of solving the problem, a more conventional way with uprights and canisters. And whenever we talked to people they would say, make me a robot that vacuums your floors. So that was like the first killer app. Getting a beer out of the fridge, that's pretty much a man's first killer app. It's an hour of vacuuming versus a minute of getting off the couch. Exactly. I see that. Now, back to what you were saying about interface, is there an aspect of this that the robot is user-interfaced even more so or in some ways different than just the practical application? So Ava is capable of interfacing with people through speech, through gesture, through touch. And as advancements continue in the mobile computing space, things like facial recognition, as you mentioned before, or basically other applications in that area, we should hopefully leverage those to deliver those advanced capabilities. Do you think of that as natural user interface in the sense that like Microsoft thinks of the Kinect or is the fact that a robot is a physical present, is that a more natural user interface? I think it's both. You know, to take Kinect as an example, playing tennis with a Kinect is nice, it's interesting, but there are sometimes where you want to actually physically interact with something. You're not holding anything in your hand. You know, steering wheel, you're doing this. So the tactile inputs are very important to us. Robots are going to be in the environments with people. People are going to touch them. It's a common way, if I come up to you and tap you on the shoulder, you're going to turn around and look at me. It's just one of the ways that humans are used to interacting with other organic beings. For robots, we want it to be the same. And are developers getting excited about that? You have like UI designers that see it that way? I think so, yeah. There's a number of people, both internal and external, that quickly see the possibilities. You know, the possibilities are pretty much endless. And whether iRobot or not does it, when should I expect something like this? When am I going to get the beer out of the fridge? Let's admit I want a beer out of the fridge. Is that five years? Is that ten years? That's close. You know, like you said, if you're talking about in a product, it's farther out. If you're talking about in research, it's happening now. The question is, is it something that you'll want to spend your hard-earned money on? Is it available at the right price point? And that's a little farther away. But you think most of the technical problems at this point are solved? The visual object recognition, grasping, all those problems are still being solved. Many technologies feel like they're solved when they're done in research, but then when they end up in practical environments, which randomly vary, you find out that those problems aren't quite solved and it takes a number of iterations of being out in the world to have them quote-unquote solved. Which seems to be an exciting thing about Ava is that you've got it out in unstructured environments already. Absolutely. Her navigation ability through cluttered environments is unparalleled. There are other robots that can navigate similarly, but a lot slower, a lot less dynamic. She's also, as I mentioned before, holonomic, meaning that she's capable of moving in any direction while facing any orientation. Like strafing. Exactly, like a first-person shooter, right? She can strafe, she can orbit, she can sidestep at two meters a second when she's going down the hallway if somebody jumps in front of her. So she's very, very sort of deft. Is that why we're going to see most of these things on wheels for the time being? Yeah, legs, if you're referring to legs, legs are, obviously there's a ton of research happening. There's toys and products built with legs. Leg robots are still being held back by how much power they can put on board and the complexity that is there, and complexity equals lower reliability and greater cost, is just not cost effective and it's not necessary. I think when you see robots climbing stairs, which were developed for people to change elevation, then you may see legged robots. So it's something you guys are aware of, right? Oh, absolutely. Keeping tabs on? You know, absolutely. Leg locomotion. I think where you'll see practical implementations of legs are more like in prosthetic applications. Sweet. Well, this is cool. I'm excited. I hope to see it wandering around the show floor soon. I think you will probably. And I hope to have it in my home too. Yeah, you'll have to talk to Laura. I will. I will. Definitely. And once you augment a robot arm, I think you have something here. All right. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot.