On the evening of October 29, Colin Angel, founder and CEO of iRobot, unveiled the 2021 "See" Dialogue Science and Technology Character Series No. 4 - The Beauty of the Machine's "Heart" • "Co-creation" in the form of a video link. Hosted by the School of Management of Fudan University, the event site on the same day, Dou Yifan, associate professor and deputy head of the Department of Information Management and Information Systems, School of Management, Fudan University, Kong Bing, an expert in the field of robotics, Le Jinxin, a senior alumnus in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics venture capital, and other guests had an in-depth dialogue with Colin Ingres in Boston, USA, and discussed views and collided ideas on topics such as the prospects of the global robot industry, the commercial landing strategy of cutting-edge technologies, and the relationship between people and artificial intelligence.
As an authoritative expert and industry pioneer in the field of mobile robotics, Colin Ingres reviewed his journey to contact robots, found iRobot, develop security robots and launch the Roomba sweeping robot. Like many others, Colin Ingres first recognized robots, starting with science fiction movies. However, unlike many people, Colin was not attracted to the robots that looked particularly complex and cool, and what really shocked and excited him were the robots that carried out simple commands and solved specific problems. "When I saw it, I thought I could understand it, I could imagine what it looked like when I made it myself, I could imagine it in the city, in the supermarket, in the family, helping people solve real problems," Colin said. ”
In 1990, Colin Ingres, who was studying for a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, officially founded iRobot. According to Shanghai Home Power Grid, after more than 30 years of development, iRobot has grown into a top enterprise in the global robot and consumer robot industry, with a cumulative sales of more than 35 million robots worldwide. However, the early days of iRobot's founding also experienced a difficult period.
Colin's first thought for making robots wasn't to sweep the floor, it was to explore space. However, due to the initial lack of technology, experience, materials, etc., the space exploration program was not very successful, but it accumulated valuable experience for iRobot.
Later, iRobot helped the government, large institutions and other countries develop a lot of advanced and practical robots, including military robots that can reduce casualties in war, high-precision "pyramid rover" exploration robots, security robots that went deep into the World Trade Center in the United States to assist in searching for survivors during the 9/11 incident, and special robots that went deep into the radiation area of the Fukushima nuclear power plant to help shut down nuclear reactions. The robot developed and produced by iRobot replaces humans to perform dangerous tasks, assists people to complete their work efficiently, and becomes an important helper in the process of human cooperation and development.
During this time, although iRobot has continued to innovate and made great progress in the field of robot research and development and manufacturing, its own survival situation is facing danger. Due to the lack of a suitable business model, iRobot did not have a stable income for a long time.
"Entrepreneurship is like repairing an airplane while flying, it requires self-adjustment and self-iteration during the flight." Colin concluded. In fact, iRobot's more than 30 years of development history is a process of continuous self-innovation and iterative upgrading.
In order to find a stable and profitable path for enterprises, iRobot began to explore commercialization, cooperating with well-known large enterprises to launch commercial cleaning robots, robot dolls and so on. Through cooperation with large enterprises, iRobot not only obtained stable income, technical development and tempering, but also gained experience in successful commercial development.
After more than 10 years of accumulated experience in technology and business, in 2002, iRobot officially launched the Roomba sweeping robot. Roomba's body brings together iRobot's rich experience in making security robots, commercial cleaning robots and other products, and pioneered the use of a three-stage cleaning structure of side brush + roller brush + suction port, which greatly improves the cleaning ability and solves the practical problems in people's real life. At the same time, Roomba has also successfully developed a new consumer product category of household cleaning robots.
However, the promotion of Roomba has not been smooth. Colin Ingres shares a very thrilling experience growing up at Roomba. When the Roomba was first launched, Colin was very optimistic about its market prospects and produced 300,000 units. As a result, because iRobot does not tell stories and is not good at marketing, none of the products are sold. Fortunately, in the commercial of a Coke product that was very popular at the time, Roomba made a stunning appearance, crooked and straight, and detonated the market. iRobot also learned from this experience, understanding that a successful company must understand the user and understand how to communicate with the user.
Today, Roomba is still upgrading, Shanghai Home Grid found that over the years, Roomba has launched innovative dirt detection technology (DirtDetect), vSLAM technology that allows robots to grow "eyes", CleanerBase automatic dust collection technology that reduces the trouble of manual dumping of garbage, Easy and worry-free CleanBase automatic dust collection technology, And Imprint intelligent route planning technology that automatically generates smart maps while sweeping the floor. "Companies driven by innovation can change the world." Colin believes this sentence in his heart, and what he is doing is also repeatedly verifying the correctness of this sentence.
Where will the future of cleaning robots go? In this regard, Colin also answered the question at the scene of the dialogue. He believes that cleaning robots are changing from intelligence to autonomy, and future robots will understand our living environment and living habits, have the ability to learn independently, and learn how to communicate with people, so that robots can become better partners for humans.
"As robots become more and more understanding of our living environment, the robot industry will have broader prospects for development." Colin Ingres concludes. For both iRobot now and a large number of competitors that have emerged in recent years, in Colin's view, the most important thing is not how to compete, how to surpass the opponent, but to know which direction to go next. He believes that we are still in the initial stage of the robot industry, the future robot can understand the needs of users, can deeply cooperate and dialogue with users, and at that time, not only the robot industry itself will change dramatically, robots will also open up new imagination space for many other industries.