Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

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.

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.

Its going to be interesting to see how society deals with artificial intelligence, but it will definitely be cool.

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 answer is navigation, manipulation, and implementation of more sophisticated intelligence. The idea that a robot will become more aware of its environment, that telling it to "go to the kitchen" means something - navigation and understanding of the environment is a robot problem. Those are the technological frontiers of the robotics industry.

In the original 'Star Wars' movie, there is a small toaster-sized and shaped robot on the Death Star that guides Stormtroopers to where they need to go. I always liked that robot because I could imagine how to build it - and it served a real purpose.