"Star Wars" was the right movie for me. I watched the MSE-6 droid leading the stormtroopers where they needed to go when they were under attack, and that got my attention much more so than C-3PO and R2-D2 because we could actually build that.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

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.'

There are so many opportunities to make a bad decision in building a robot company on top of all the normal ways that entrepreneurs screw up that it is incredibly difficult to truly create value because it is so cost-sensitive.

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.

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

The utility of the robot needs to come first. It's business model over technology.