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

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.

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

The reason it has taken so long for the robotics industry to move forward is because people keep trying to make something that is cool but difficult to achieve rather than trying to find solutions to actual human problems. Technology can be extremely expensive if you don't focus.

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.

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