When I was building robots in the early 1990s, the problems of voice recognition, image understanding, VOIP, even touchscreen technologies - these were robotics problems.

Hollywood likes to imagine robots as mechanical copies of ourselves - which is a terrible idea.

I grew up mostly in Schenectady, N.Y. From an early age, building and creating things was a real passion for me.

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.

We learned that very few people care how you accomplish something. Instead, these people care more about whether you create value for your end user.

The answer is navigation, manipulation, and implementation of more sophisticated intelligence. The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to "go to the kitchen" means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.

Its going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.