Robotics Innovation Quotes

It's the first time an exoskeleton has been controlled by brain activity and offered feedback to the patients. Doing a demonstration in a stadium is something very much outside our routine in robotics. It's never been done before.

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.

I'm excited about bringing robots into the market, about having the most effect in the world.

Have you seen these Japanese hospital droids, or humanoids, or whatever they call it? They've perfected the skin, and the skin looks so real. They have these motors between the eyes for when they smile. It's just mind-blowing.

I see Grand Challenge not as the end of the robotics adventure we're on: it's almost like the beginning.

The 'snakebot', which is a type of mechanized, biologically inspired robot, itself has roots in Japanese laboratories of the 1970s. What the team at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon is doing today under professor Howie Choset is making the 'snakebots' stronger, smaller, and more maneuverable than ever.

There was a pizza delivery robot from 2008, where I built a Prius to deliver pizza from downtown SF to Treasure Island.

In 2008, I decided I wanted to begin a new venture, so I started Rethink Robotics. We build factory robots that a person can learn to train in just a few minutes. In May 2011, I stepped off the iRobot board.

I won a robotics championship when I was 13.

That's exciting because to create new value in the robot space quickly, you need to stand on the shoulders of other technological developments.

We are seeing robotics creep into all areas and become accessible, where it used to be something tedious that only the most persistent people could access.