There are so many opportunities to make a bad decision in building a robot company on top of all the normal ways that entrepreneurs screw up that it is incredibly difficult to truly create value because it is so cost-sensitive.

At the World Cup, there is a constant risk that you might find a bag or some object that has been left behind, and no one is quite sure what it is. To bring in a full bomb-disposal team for each item can be very time-consuming. The PackBot can go over rough terrain, climb stairs, pick things up, and also be operated from a safe distance.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.