Gadgetory

I'm Paul Miller with the verge I'm here with Colin angle the CEO of my robot we're going to talk about robots which is my favorite subject in the entire world and thank you so much for joining us it's so hard to figure out where you guys are focus because you do those wild crazy amphibian thing you're talking about just really serious military stuff you do cleaning stuff I where's where's your focus what do you spend your time well you know I think that the consumer side of our business has really become a very very important part so that the amount of energy we are investing in the consumer aspects our business Trump's most of the most of our programs the military side is very important for us we have the PackBot the scuba and we've just launched a small first look robot which you can you can throw probably as far as you can because and have that survive and send back information and also are looking at remote presence we have a mission we have a purpose it's all long-term going toward extending independent living in the home for the customer and so that as the country ages as the world ages we need solutions to allow people to live independently we need robots in the home that not just clean the home that's necessary but not sufficient we also need technology to allow doctors and nurses and caregivers to come into the home and provide special purpose care or else you end up moving into assisted living and that's very expensive and increasingly unaffordable for people right so we're developed while we develop these cleaning technologies we're also working on robots a good provide medical care and so we also just announced an hour what a Segway by the way well done well we've got this very cool new robot which is the rp-vita and its mission is to start allowing doctors to actually treat and diagnose patients at a distance so with this robot and an ipad right a doctor can first send the robot to whatever patient he wants to see and when the robot arrives there interact with that person zoom in using a high-definition camera take bio readings your your use a stethoscope or interface with any of the other instruments in that the patient's room and make a diagnosis so what's the next step after this dude do you know you talked about helping people aged independently in the home is this going to work in the home I mean it's a little bulky it's not going to do stairs well there's you know ultimately you want the robot to do stairs so that's a problem to go solve minute the in the home ultimately what we'll what we'll see is the robots like rumbo slowly disappearing they'll still be there but you'll have to do less and less in order to maintain them hey Selena you see robot and Frank I of course does that is that the dream well you know we're not sure that we want the robot to have the same willingness to go along with questionable activities but you know I think that's not FDA approved yet not yet nice there seems to me to be sort of a leap recently with these sort of a you know Baxter and these cheaper robotic arms that's something you guys are looking at that is that getting easier quickly I mean it's as robots have a less expensive ability to understand in their environment it opens doors for the robots to do more sophisticated things Baxter is an is a manufacturing robot so it operates in a unstructured environment but it also is designed to be used in close proximity with people so it's cool because you no longer have to separate the robot and the and the worker yeah and so that type of technology ultimately will become important as we add manipulation onto our robots and you see that technology accelerating absolutely i mean i think that what Baxter does is shows that lower-cost manipulation is possible where we trade artificial intelligence for mechanical precision and that's that's a great and exciting trend robots light using more artificial intelligence instead of spending more on mechanical correct and then you mentioned this becoming like a robot Butler or that's your dream I remember you talking about that before of a bigger robot helping operate the other robots but a lot of that is about the user interface and we're seeing Siri and Google now these really exciting artificial intelligent natural language user interfaces is that something you guys are looking at or how do you also will be a consumer of that technology the mobile industry is a fantastic boon for the robot industry right because I can just put an Android or an iOS device as the head of my robot and have access to all of that functionality at a very very low cost and so the home robot that's interacting with you will be leveraging the the mobile user interface technology that exists and I robot will be focusing on obstacle avoidance navigation map building manipulation in New Age there you go and well again it's an accelerator for the industry so we'll be able to see more and more capable robots first attacking commercial applications and then moving down in price right so when do I get to buy one of these when could I afford this with an arm to take my frozen chicken out of my freezer to defrost it for me while I'm at work how well do they pay you at the verge you know I think it that's the hell do they pay me at the road the technology to do that at a relatively expensive price exists today and you know over the next 10 years we're going to see it go down and down and I won't predict exactly what the date is but it certainly is rapidly approaching and in ten years for serious this time right we've heard that number a lot in the robotics industry but not for me not from you I may I believe one step at a time I think that when people start making grandiose statements about what in a mere few years as possible or what their fear is in a few years we're not we're not close okay we need to pick applications that have real concrete value to customers deliver exceed their expectations and move on i mean i think that the room is such an amazing example of what can happen if you do something very basic but not credibly not right but very well I mean the there's over 8 million rumbas that have been sold and we are the fastest growing segment of the vacuuming industry and around the world robot vacuuming that's a few years ago went from being non-existent to being a category on itself where in many countries we are one of the leading vacuum cleaners soul and so that's a business that's something that will allow us to make money reinvest money create new things and accelerate the marketplace so pick something do it very well move on to the next thing and then over time as I mentioned these point solutions for cleaning will becoming increasingly self-reliant so you may have to interact with them you know once a year and a robot like this comes along greet you at the door you interact with it and from there your house knows what to do and how to take care of itself awesome well thank you so much i look forward to that future ok I don't know really what to say to a robot I love you