Grant Imahara Quotes

With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950s. We are so past that.

The way that the robotics market is going to grow, at least in the home, is that we'll have a number of different special purpose robots.

Building robot versions of people is very expensive.

The 'snakebot', which is a type of mechanized, biologically inspired robot, itself has roots in Japanese laboratories of the 1970s. What the team at Pittsburgh-based Carnegie Mellon is doing today under professor Howie Choset is making the 'snakebots' stronger, smaller, and more maneuverable than ever.

You're not going to talk to your vacuum cleaning robot: in fact, you may never see your vacuum cleaning robot because, ideally, you come home every day and your floors are freshly vacuumed.

When I was building robots in the early 1990s, the problems of voice recognition, image understanding, VOIP, even touchscreen technologies - these were robotics problems.

Technology is at the forefront of everything these days - communication, work. It's amazing and scary at the same time how robots have evolved, but I find it hard to believe that robots will completely rule the world. Not in my lifetime anyway.

Robots... I think that is a hot topic.

Have you seen these Japanese hospital droids, or humanoids, or whatever they call it? They've perfected the skin, and the skin looks so real. They have these motors between the eyes for when they smile. It's just mind-blowing.

If you want to make a serious, rugged, reliable robot, you can start with the Create platform and just build stuff on top of it.

At MIT, in Professor Rodney Brooks' lab, I was involved in a project, led by Anita Flynn, to build robots using techniques similar to those used in building silicon chips. We got some silicon micro-machined motors to move a bit, but this didn't lead to an actual product.

I had the honor of speaking with Asimov. The album ended up being something not directly related to Asimov, but related instead to the concept of the power of robotics.

Most robotic heads have 20 motors. Mine have 32.

We're seeing the arrival of conversational robots that can walk in our world. It's a golden age of invention.

In 2008, I decided I wanted to begin a new venture, so I started Rethink Robotics. We build factory robots that a person can learn to train in just a few minutes. In May 2011, I stepped off the iRobot board.

I also know that in the second movie, the sequel, Eric made some huge advances with the robot suit. That just made it even better. You put the suit on and moved your arms then the robot's arms would move in sync with yours.

It's hard not to love Roomba. Roomba had such an amazing impact on the field. When we launched, we asked people, 'Is it a robot?' and got an overwhelming no - 'robots' have arms and legs; they command data. There was a very strong perception that robots had to look like people.

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

Robots have gotten steadily more capable, but humans' expectations that robots should have minds keeps biting robot developers.

I ultimately got into robotics because for me, it was the best way to study intelligence.

I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.

It is now possible to make far cheaper robotic devices, which in turn means that physical services provided by robotics will get substantially cheaper.

We live in a world where all the parts of a robot are very cheap, yet we don't have a lot of robots. And the thing that has been missing has been good enough Artifical Intelligence.

IT for a long time has been about how do you make old processes more efficient. But with all of the progress in digital technology, there is a kind of digital transformation that is occurring. And you see it with the explosion in the number of devices; you see it in the explosion in the number of applications.

It's been an old saw in science fiction for a long time, since 'Frankenstein,' that we're going to create life that's going to turn on us.