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 way that the robotics market is going to grow, at least in the home, is that we'll have a number of different special purpose robots.

The ideal vacuum cleaner would be one you never see. It needs to not just be a cool gadget, but a product that cleans your floor correctly. I can imagine people having a cupboard full of robots that only come out when you need them to fulfil a specific purpose.

I think, people are generally willing to imagine robots of all shapes, as humanoid robots are not practical.

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

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

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.