iRobot’s Colin Angle thinks the smart home starts with a robot vacuum

“In the virtual world, it’s very easy to understand everything about the environment because it’s inside the computer,” iRobot CEO Colin Angle said. “If you have a simulated room you’re inside the computer. You know precisely where things are. In the robot industry, we almost dislike simulations because they are doomed to succeed. The challenge of robotics and AI for robotics isn’t so much the AI — that’s actually easy. It’s understanding what’s going on. There’s been AI systems for the last 20 years that could understand the sentence, ‘please go to the kitchen and get me a drink.’ But if you don’t know where the kitchen is, that doesn’t help you.” Read the full article here.