“I’ve only had one job in my entire life: this. We had been promised robots in books and movies, but I didn’t see any. I founded iRobot after graduating from MIT with the goal of advancing the robotics industry.” He has succeeded, at least to a degree. Colin Angle (Concord, USA, 56 years old) has been manufacturing robots of all kinds for more than 30 years. His first steps were taken hand in hand with the Department of Defense, to whom he has sold thousands of tracked automata to defuse antipersonnel mines. His are the reconnaissance robots that toured the ruins of the Twin Towers after the attacks in search of survivors.
But its great success came from the Roomba robot vacuum cleaners. Now almost a pop icon, they inaugurated the domestic robotics market, which according to this engineer will be “enormous” in a few years. “The original Roomba algorithm is the same as the one used by the robots we made for the Pentagon, but with a built-in vacuum cleaner,” says Angle, sitting on a sofa with his feet crossed and in a leisurely tone.
iRobot devices have several sensors and powerful software that allow them to move with reasonable precision. They vacuum and scrub independently quite efficiently. They are able to know if we are at home or not (searching for our devices via bluetooth) to activate when they are not disturbing. Its technology has not gone unnoticed among the giants of the sector. Amazon announced in August of last year its intention to acquire the company. The operation must still be approved by the US regulator, which is studying whether it violates antitrust laws. The European Commission has opened its own investigation this summer in this regard. “We believe that Amazon is focused on a very long-term vision and that this can give iRobot the opportunity to innovate faster than before,” he says. Angle attends EL PAÍS in Madrid during his European tour to present the latest Roomba models.
Ask. What is new about the latest models compared to the previous ones?
Answer. We now have the best robot vacuum cleaner on the market, the J9+, and the best robot vacuum cleaner and mop, the J9+ Combo. We have made the robot capable of cleaning for 60 days without having to touch it. Also in the case of the robotic mop: whereas before the water had to be changed after each expedition, now this maintenance is done automatically at the emptying, refilling and loading station. The vacuum cleaner is now more powerful, and we have a system we call dirt detective that allows each room to be cleaned the way you want it to be.
The Urbie robot, one of the first launched by iRobot, was designed for military uses and rescue missions.NASA/JPL/CALTECH
Q. What do you mean?
A. We have incorporated software that draws a map of the house and the different rooms, and on it it looks at what is in each room, how dirty it is historically and other considerations that lead it to learn what happens in every corner of the home. For example, that the dining room must be cleaned more than the hallway and always after meals, or that it is better to clean the bathroom after the kitchen, and not the other way around. Establish specific cleaning plans based on the type of floor and accumulated dirt and predict priority areas.
Q. How do you imagine robotic cleaning in ten years?
A. The intelligence that makes this robot great can be applied to more things. Why can’t we make other devices in the home understand where they are and what we need? For example, air purifiers are often set to low power because they make a lot of noise, when they are not effective. Why can’t the device know when it’s a good time to run loud without disturbing?
Q. Is your idea to integrate Roomba robots with more home appliances?
A. The concept of the smart home is very confusing today. There are some good ideas, but intelligence is lacking. I think the home needs to be thought of more as a robot, as a system. And 10 years from now, iRobot will want to do more than just vacuum and mop floors.
Colin Angle poses next to the Roomba J9+, whose new docking station allows you to change the water for washing and empty the waste tank, giving it 60 days of autonomy.Claudio Álvarez
Q. Amazon has smart home devices like its Echo voice assistant, Ring doorbells and cameras, or the Astro robot. Would they fit into that plan?
A. Amazon has a great catalog and we have a good product and good technology. He is very interested in fascinating his clients. They design products for many parts of the home. Our visions are aligned, yes.
Q. Will we end up talking to the vacuum cleaner?
A. Of course. It’s not something we’re working on, but Google, Apple, and Amazon are developing conversational models for their smart speakers. Right now it is difficult to guide a Roomba by voice, because you have to give the orders (to Alexa or other assistants) with a very specific syntax, and that can be frustrating. But if we can develop a conversational interface where I can say ‘Hey Roomba, you can go clean the kitchen when I’m done eating’, and Roomba says okay, then everything will flow. We will open a door to a new style of interaction with technology.
We know that there is a rectangular object called a kitchen in your house, but an online sales portal knows the last 78 things you have bought
Q. The information that Roombas robots collect from homes is very sensitive. How do you protect that data? Are these vacuum cleaners safe?
A. The information collected by the robots does not leave the devices, so the images and plans of the home remain in the vacuum unless the user says otherwise. The data transmitted to the user’s phone is end-to-end encrypted, so it is not susceptible to theft. The next level of security is that the data we maintain is stored in a way that is only useful to the robot. In other words, if you were to defeat all of our cybersecurity measures and get hold of the blueprints for a house, you’d be disappointed in what you’d see: a series of polygonal shapes labeled kitchen or room, because the robot doesn’t care about any other information. We don’t store people’s private information because it is sensitive and we don’t need it to function. I would like customers to make their purchasing decisions based on the privacy that products offer.
Q. iRobot has access to intimate information about homes: their physical layout. The rest of the technology companies do not have that data.
A. We know that there is a rectangular object called a kitchen in your house, but an online sales portal knows the last 78 things you have bought and can make richer inferences about your behavior than we can. I’m not sure we can add much to those predictions with what we know. And I don’t want to either. Our commitment to privacy runs deep. We will never sell customer data, we will make money another way. My long-term vision is to help seniors live more independently. I don’t want us to be a data vacuum. I’m not interested in that data, actually. I want that if you buy a Roomba, you never buy another cleaning robot.
I don’t want Roombas to be data vacuums.
Q. When Amazon announced its intention to acquire iRobot, however, many thought it was after their data.
A. I know. I think that Amazon, like all other retailers, has much better ways of getting information from users than through our bots. We do not provide them with any tools that improve what they already have in this regard. I don’t think they want to buy iRobot because of the data we have, because it is irrelevant.
Q. Despite the security measures you have described, private images of Roomba users taken by their vacuum cleaners circulated on social networks last year.
A. They did not come from consumer robots. That could not have happened with a commercial Roomba. The images belonged to users who were testing development models and who had signed in and consented to iRobot recording and collecting images. They were filtered by workers from an external company (Scale AI) that is dedicated to annotating images for machine learning models (manually labeling images so that the machine associates a series of pixels with an idea). It was unfortunate, but it wasn’t a consumer issue, more of a development issue. The company is now facing legal problems. We’ll make sure it can never happen again.
Q. Do you still work with image annotation companies?
A. We continue to do a lot of computer vision work. We have added new safeguards for image annotation efforts. We are turning to automated tools for annotation, which gives us more control over the process, so we don’t have to deal with third parties like before.
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