Robot Design Quotes

Building a robot that has legs and walks around is a very expensive proposition. Mother Nature has created many wonderful things, but one thing we do have that nature doesn't is the wheel, a continuous rotating joint, and tracks, so we need to make use of inventions to make things simpler.

Most of the robots being developed for home use are functional in design - Gecko's homecare robot looks rather like the Star Wars robot R2-D2. Honda and Sony are designing robots that look more like the same movie's 'android' C-3PO.

Hollywood likes to imagine robots as mechanical copies of ourselves - which is a terrible idea.

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.

There's something so arrogant about us creating robots that are more and more human-looking or acting. It's like we're playing God. Let's create something that's a reflection of us, but it's inferior.

Through our evolution, we're so specialized for social interaction. So, if you can really design robots that can interact with people, in this very natural, interpersonal way, I think that would be great. You wouldn't have to have people read manuals, in order to operate them.

We will not have humanoid androids. It's interesting: when you start trying to make robots look more human, you end up making them look more grotesque. It takes very little to go from super-attractive robot to hideous robot.

Robots are very tricky to design and expensive, whereas humans are cheaply manufactured. Humans can handle things with greater manual dexterity than most robots I've known.

Being a sci-fi geek myself and going to movies all my life, I came to the conclusion that there were really two camps of how robots have been designed. It's either the tin man, which is a human with metal skin, or it's an R2D2.

And I think it's likely that there will be Data's out there one day. I hope so, if there are, that they all look exactly like me!

We're going to have robots in the home, but they're not going to be walking. Legs are complicated, unreliable and costly. Robots are going to look and be designed to meet the function they're supposed to perform. People will still name them and connect with them.

When we built Roomba, we explicitly designed it to not have a face. We didn't want to think it was cute; we wanted people to take it seriously, so we gave it more of an industrial look. People personified their Roomba anyway. Over 80 percent of people name their robot. We did nothing to encourage people to do that, but they do it anyway.

Why would you not have a robot that looks like Abraham Lincoln? Why would it look like an erector set? Why use a computer with a punchcard, when you could use one with a touch pen on the screen? Why a car, when you could use a jetpack?

Robots touch something deeply human within us. For me, robots are all about people.

There are things that I invented - the creaky geriatric robot that is always grumpy, for example, or the little wheelie guy, he's not in the Hasbro lore. But kids love that stuff - this little guy as a pet on a chain. They gravitate towards it.

If you make your robot look exactly like Albert Einstein, then the robot better be as smart as Einstein, or its user is going to feel cheated.

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.

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.

The ideal vacuum cleaner would be one you never see. It needs to not just be a cool gadget, but a product that cleans your floor correctly. I can imagine people having a cupboard full of robots that only come out when you need them to fulfil a specific purpose.

I think, people are generally willing to imagine robots of all shapes, as humanoid robots are not practical.

The last thing I want my robot to be is sarcastic. I want them to be pragmatic and reliable - just like my dishwasher.

Well, really the way worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.

If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people.

What is a human-like droid that operates from a place of free will and has been designed to have a soul? That's fascinating stuff that you just can't quite comprehend quickly. It's not like playing a fireman with a wife and kid. You can gauge where that's going to go and what's going to happen, and you can talk to other people who have done it.

If you wanted to design a robot that could learn as well as it possibly could, you might end up with something that looked a lot like a 3-year-old.