They, Robot

In the June issue of Business 2.0, I wrote about Caleb Chung, creator of Furby and Pleo,  the robot dinosaur set to launch this summer. While interviewing Caleb, I attended a meeting of the Churchill club  at which he spoke alongside three other robotics industry luminaries: iRobot CEO Colin Angle, the man behind the Roomba; Soren Lund, senior director of the Lego Mindstorms Group; and Sebastian Thrun, Stanford professor and creator of the DARPA Grand Challenge-winning robot car, Stanley. Here is a sample of what this glittering panel said about the rise of robotics:

CALEB CHUNG: This is like the birth of the PC all over again. We have such a rich sandbox of parts that are low-priced. It’s incredible leverage for ideas. In Taiwan [where Pleo is being manufactured], "PC" is starting to stand for "Personal Companion." Next time, you’ll have 8 or 20 people on the stage, all saying robots are something different. None of us fear competitors. There’s so much to do.

We're not in the toy market -- the margins are horrible. No toy could cause us this much pain [laughs]. Pleo has the heart of a toy –- his goal is to connect emotionally with his user. There is a huge community that wants to repurpose Pleo. They’ll be able to adjust his personality, even make him bipolar. For Pleo, emotions are a second-order control system. 

People buy with their heart at the end of the day. I’m going for the housewife, not the geek. The geeks will buy it no matter what. You have to enter the home as something that’s welcomed. It’s a cultural problem. What has to change for this industry to take off? Everyone over 50 has to die. There’s a lot of fear about robots out there, and as soon as something is a little bit smart, a little bit human, it comes back to the surface.
 

COLIN ANGLE: The advance we need is not technological. It’s people viewing robots from a business perspective instead of an academic perspective, which has held robots back for a long time. Look at [Sony's human-like robot] ASIMO, which I look at with scorn. It’s not useful. They’re not going to deliver. They’re going to break down too much. They’re not going to create the robot industry. It’s business models married to good engineering which will do that.

Most people have a relationship with their Roomba. Most people don’t want to name it beforehand; you ask them, you’d get a violent reaction. Then there’s this moment, you look over, Roomba’s doing something on your behalf, and you get this pang, it’s part of the family. We got this one customer service call: “Rosie isn’t working.” But the customer didn't want to send Rosie back.

Moore’s law doesn’t apply to gears, and that’s the problem. We’re not seeing an exponential increase in cost performance for non-electronic components. If Caleb’s company starts making money with Pleo, that’s a huge game-changer for the robotics industry. By going public, we reduced the price for anyone else to get capital investment in robotics.

We have an aging population. The number of over-65s is going to double; half our nurses are going to retire. So we’re going to do all the tasks you don’t want to do. First we’re going to clean your floors, then we’re going to wash your windows. Robots can make house calls instead of doctors. If there’s true customer value, it’ll overcome the fear factor. Robot lawnmowers have been suggested, but it turns out for most people, mowing the lawn is hour-long cigar-break.

SOREN LUND: Mindstorms is not a product. It’s a toolset. NASA uses it. The price point is vital. Consumers are waiting to spend more money if you can convince them it’s worth it – look at the iPod, look at the Roomba. You have a good experience with them, and you’re prepared to spend that money again. Schools are getting it. We're getting huge orders from schools. By teaching kids robotics, you can teach them math, engineering, technology, mechanics, electronics. When I went to school, there was nothing like this.

SEBASTIAN THRUN: It’s not a hardware race; it’s a software race. Robot cars will drive you 60 miles, point to point. Eventually, in the next 5 years, we will succeed in doing this. And then it will change society. We trained Stanley the way you’d train a young driver –- we took it for a spin, showed it how we drive. If you’ve been on a plane, you were flown by a computer for part of the journey. Now imagine a chauffer button -- you press it and the car drives for you for a while. If it's a $2,000 feature, would you pay for it? Absolutely.

There are multiple killer apps for robotics. If you could have a $5,000 research robot helping you out around the house, rather than having you go in a nursing home, you’d absolutely do that.