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.

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.

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

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.

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.

"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.

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.