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.

My very clear vision for the ideal Roomba is one you never see and you never touch. Our research priorities are explicitly focused on the Roomba of the future that will deliver on the promise of automatically cleaning your floor.

I believe one day nano-robots will play an important role in medicine.

One of the big things coming out of healthcare reform is a thing called the Community Living Assistance Services and Supports Act (CLASS) which is a mechanism to reimburse people staying at home for technology and services that allow them to stay at home.

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.

In the beginning of Roomba, we all took turns answering the support line. Once, a woman called and explained that her robot had a defective motor. I said, 'Send it back. We'll send you a new one.' She said, 'No - I'm not sending you Rosie.'

I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.