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

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

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

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.

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

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