iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype

https://crazystupidtech.com/2025/09/29/irobot-founder-dont-believe-the-ai-robotics-hype/

by herbertl • 10 months ago

259 189 10 months ago

rmason• 10 months ago

I really liked this guy. Maybe it's Boston but here's a guy with two wildly successful startups in robotics and he's having trouble raising money because his idea isn't sexy enough!

I thought investors were smart and knew how to calculate odds. There is never any absolutely sure thing. But if a guy has been wildly successful twice aren't the odds pretty good he can do it a third time?

skeeter2020• 10 months ago

I know a very low profile entrepreneur who has essentially built the exact same business (with slight variations) 3 times over the past 20+ years, selling the first two, so yes I believe there is some corelation between his 2 previous successes and being able to do it again. Even if it's imaginary the funding markets swear by previous success being a strong marker for future success.

monero-xmr• 10 months ago

Years ago my friend had the best app for a particular game in the App Stores. But competition was rising. So he just rebranded his app with a few changes and then got 3 of the top 5 spots! Same underlying app

jpm_sd• 10 months ago

iRobot got crushed by Chinese competitors. Rethink failed early, they had a poor quality product and Universal made a much better cobot. And this new venture is pointless, there are 10 other companies in the Boston area alone doing warehouse automation...

infecto9• 10 months ago

Upvote for you sir. I was writing the same response as you posted the exact response. The only thing I did not mention that I will add here. iRobot was kind of a turd. They basically kept the same turd of a robot for a decade plus. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang…

adabyron• 10 months ago

I'm a huge fan of the ease of cleaning & repairing iRobots, especially the earlier models. I don't know if the competitors match that but I have preferred their simplicity & quality.

China competitors are always going to be tough to beat in terms of margins.

Animats4• 10 months ago

The comment about humanoid forms raising expectations comes from Rethink's hype and failure. Rethink tried to solve manipulation and failed.

The Rethink hype video, with their cute little face on a screen.[1]

What the Rethink robot could actually do: take PC boards off a conveyor and put them in a fixture.[2] That's a routine robotic load/unload task. Like this one with Fanuc robots.[3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4mULTknb2I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnzmxJS4Rp4

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za5z1lb0hdU

binoct• 10 months ago

Details of this situation aside, the take "doing x is pointless because lots of other people are doing it" is a bit rough.

irjustin• 10 months ago

Having been through the VC system, I don't believe his face value statement, and I 100% believe you're right.

They want to invest, but not at his terms that he's demanding.

The thought experiment is - he wants to raise 1m @ 2m val. 50%. There's not a VC/angel/seed who wouldn't take that deal given who he is. So he's pricing himself at a level he "is willing to do this startup thing again" and it's simply too expensive.

oofbey• 10 months ago

You assume VCs are rational. They try to be. But they’re not.

infecto9• 10 months ago

Define success. Without a doubt iRobot was a category leader for a long time. They created the market but were they ever profitable? At this point it feels like a company on life support that is getting their butts kicked by the Chinese who offer double the product for half the cost. Without a doubt though he created the category. Was the second company ever a success, all I could find is it being trade for parts over and over.

This third company looks interesting but it’s also a flooded market at this point.

So for me the guy never had a real success and is currently building in a market that has been for years flooded with products like his.

yurimo• 10 months ago

Rodney Brooks is widely recognized and celebrated roboticist, ran CSAIL for a while. iRobot as a company created a new market and managed to put a functional household robot out there, whether Chinese alternatives ate the share of it is largely irrelevant to his argument on humanoids, which I find to be completely reasonable.

ripe• 10 months ago

the guy never had a real success

iRobot has sold over fifty million Roombas to date. Packbots are also highly profitable and have saved many lives.

majormajor• 10 months ago

"Were they ever profitable" is an easy enough thing to look up, why not just do that instead of use it as a rhetorical device?

https://macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/IRBT/irobot/gross-prof...

From that, they had 13 straight years of profitable net income starting in 2009. Rough recently because they got eaten up by cheaper upstarts; happens to almost everyone eventually. But clearing several hundred million cumulative in net income over a decade+ (peaking 2018-2020, so they were consistently growing from 2009 to 2020 even) is far from "were they ever profitable" territory. They don't have pre-2009 there, but from some other googling it looks like they were profitable by when he left in 2008 after their 2005 IPO. So he was there from inception to IPO and millions-a-year-profitability, and then you're discounting that because 12 years after he left some companies in China had better copies. Building something for 15 years to IPO isn't some VC pump and dump scam, it's harder.

If that's not success you have a ridiculous bar. "So for me the guy never had a real success" - get out of here, do your googling before making claims like that.

tennisflyi• 10 months ago

I mean, VCs want stories (or at least hype) - not accolades, i.e., Altman, Neumann. Heck, accolades might hurt you. They want the unfound gem/they're so smart/cerebral...

itomato• 10 months ago

How many years were they on the market before they added a dust buster to the dock? 3-4?

CaptainOfCoit• 10 months ago

One quote that really stood out to me:

Rodney: The robots—they’re not embodied. I always say about a physical robot, the physical appearance makes a promise about what it can do. The Roomba was this little disc on the floor. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to clean the windows. But you can imagine it cleaning the floor. But the human form sort of promises it can do anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

gpt5• 10 months ago

All these companies are pursuing humanoids precisely because we've built the world around that "form factor" (and we evolved ourselves to fit to the world). It's a general purpose design. It's the same reason why OpenAI pursued LLMs, as they are general purpose.

Yes, like LLMs, they will over-promise in the beginning. But it still make sense to pursue that form factor from an investment perspective if we think it's feasible.

rolha-capoeira2• 10 months ago

And whether or not it actually is feasible, many are betting millions that it is, and marketing it as possible to keep the innovation machine running until we achieve it

imtringued• 10 months ago

I don't know why people keep saying "the world" when they talk about extremely small subsets of human civilization. Most roads weren't designed for humans. Flat surfaces in buildings were not designed for humans. Packages were designed to be handled by suction cups. Containers were designed to be intermodal transport, not to be carried by humans.

Space is practically inaccessible to most people.

It's crazy how many people purposefully become ignorant of the things they see every day with their own eyes.

lm284694• 10 months ago

Well initially we tried to build planes with flapping wings because obviously the only things flying had flapping wings

yardie3• 10 months ago

The human form evolved to run long distances in wide open fields, climb trees for nutrient and protection, and create and wield tools. We have built the world to accommodate for that around us. It is not a general purpose form factor.

An urbanized, general purpose robot may take an entirely different form factor than bipedal homosapien, ie. tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell: SAC.

rob74• 10 months ago

I think Asimov wrote something along those lines in one of his robots cycle novels (which leads us back nicely to "iRobot", er, "I, Robot"): why build a vacuum robot, a window-cleaner robot, a robot lawnmower, a robot car etc. etc. when you can build a humanoid robot which can operate all the devices designed for humans? Ok, currently it's "if you could build" rather than "when you can build", but looking at it from the science fiction writer's perspective, it makes sense...

rolha-capoeira2• 10 months ago

... I always say about [a language model], the [linguistic] appearance makes a promise about what it can do. [Clippy] was this little [cartoon paper clip]. It didn’t promise much—you saw it and thought, that’s not going to [write the next great novel]. But you can imagine it [offering limited help]. But [human language] sort of promises it can [write] anything a human can. And that’s why it’s so attractive to people—it’s selling a promise that is amazing.

danielmarkbruce• 10 months ago

The difference between the promise and reality of LLMs and the difference between the promise and reality of humanoid robots are a different order of magnitude.

mistercheph2• 10 months ago

Hasnt written a great novel, wont ever write a great novel, will definitely write regurgitated slop that midwit tech slaves steeped in the works of Malcolm Gladwell and Co. will read four words of and proclaim "Dostoevsky!"

xg152• 10 months ago

I would say the same delusion even applies to the field of machine learning in general.

The "API" of trainable algorithms is essentially "arbitrary bunch of data in -> thing I want out" and the magic algorithm in the middle will figure out the rest.

Because "thing I want" is given as a list of examples, you're not even required to come up with a clear definition of what it exactly is that you want. In fact, it's a major "selling point" of the field that you don't have to.

But all of that creates the illusion that machine learning / "AI" would be able to generate a robust algorithm for any correspondence, as long as you can package up a trainset with enough examples and shore up enough "compute" to do the number crunching. Predict intelligence from passport photos? Or chances of campaign success from political speeches? No problem! Economic outlook from tea leaves? Sure thing!

The setup will not even tell you if your idea just needs more tweaks or fundamentally can't work. In both cases, all you get is a less-than-ideal number in your chosen evaluation metric.

beowulfey• 10 months ago

I cannot quite tell what point this is trying to make. LLMs are just the next Clippy? As far as I can remember no one actually liked Clippy, so my read is you are not a fan of LLMs, but I could see it going either way.

pts_• 10 months ago

Aren't iRobots really not that clever and maybe can be improved with LLMs?

solid_fuel• 10 months ago

What mechanism are you envisioning here?

smj-edison• 10 months ago

I think they're just as smart as they need to be, and no smarter :)

rogerrogerr• 10 months ago

I have a Roomba 980 that I scored off a rich neighbor for $50. It cleans well, makes nice parallel lines on the floor and reliably does not get stuck. I can be out of the house, push the button for it to clean, and will always come back to a clean floor and a charging Roomba. Can't imagine wanting much more.

imp0cat2• 10 months ago

The 980 was top of the line, and it was also quite expensive when it was new. No wonder it still works quite well (and being so old, it still supports stuff like maps and voice control).

irusensei• 10 months ago

I've retired mine in favor of a Switchbot. Battery was tired and the cost of a new one is 1/3 the price of a new one so I got this K10.

At first I've liked it but the bruise rotor is already making rattling noises. It advertised itself as Matter compatible but I had to buy a hub thing to integrate it in HomeKit.

Worst thing it relies on Chinese servers for its metrics. I got China blocked on my router due to reasons so I can't check the status of the parts without leaving my wifi. I already bought a box of 1 year replacement parts for this but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.

leptons• 10 months ago

iRobots were intended to clean up slop, not create more of it.

protocolture2• 10 months ago

At MIT, I taught big classes with lots of students, so maybe that helped. I came here in an Uber this morning and asked the guy what street we were on. He had no clue. He said, “I just follow it.” (‘It’ being the GPS—Ed.) And that’s the issue—there’s human intervention, but people can’t figure out how to help when things go wrong.

I live on a culdesac, and theres no instructions I could give uber drivers to help them find my house, when uber added a random roadblock on our street.

I tried guiding them by voice, but none of them read street signs. Its crazy. They just rock up to the dot and complain. Issue being, the dot was the closest accessible street, so one street in either direction.

One guy made the same wrong turn twice before cancelling.

I hate taxis, but at least taxi drivers can be expected to have some basic local knowledge.

pastage2• 10 months ago

You need to work out what the nearest routable adress is. This works wonderfully with taxis here.

FWIW cul de sacs are an evil invention, and what you describe is a common routing problem. The rescue services here solved it by mandating addresses with geolocation and the nearest streets for every house around here. That failed me because everyone uses that official data that is convenient for fire truck rescue.

protocolture2• 10 months ago

The issue was resolved by complaining to the Uber Maps team for 9 months until they removed their fake road block.

The work around in the interim was a combination of:

1. Writing a long description of how to access our property. 2. Trying to limit the distance an uber driver had to travel. <1km made it more likely for them to review the map and comment before driving. Dont ask me why. 3. Oscillating the drop off marker on the map to make it more likely that the driver was sent to our street at all, where we could wave at them to get them to drive beyond the psychological roadblock. 4. Attrition lead some drivers to remember my name, and just come straight to the property ignoring the map.

Any other mapping service delivered people to our property fine. Its just that Uber randomly blocked the end of our street. Meaning our street had no entrance.

Problem was that, uber has an exclusive relationship for delivery with one of our local supermarkets, and my wife doesnt drive and was stuck at home with an angry baby for the duration.

Due to this issue we did push the maximum amount of our orders through other delivery apps, probably taking significant income away from uber. But they have deliberately structured their support channels to be impossible to deal with.

Animats4• 10 months ago

This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.[1]

There are already many companies selling automated carts that run around warehouses. Search for "automated guided cart".

I thought the humanoid thing was silly until I saw the pricing. Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla. I though these things were going to cost like Boston Dynamics products. No, the hardware is already much cheaper.

This is still a low-volume product and prices are headed downward. Humanoid robots are going to be cheaper than cars. Having more degrees of freedom than you really need for any single job will be outweighed by the cost advantages of mass production and the advantages of interchangeability.

The manipulation problem remains tough, but with moderately priced and standardized hardware available, more people can work on it.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45392922

ssivark2• 10 months ago

Here's the Unitree G1, starting out at US$22,000, less than a Toyota Corolla.

The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.

This is roughly the same content Brooks posted himself a few years ago, and was covered on HN last week.

That Brooks' post is his latest one, from a few days ago.

matthewdgreen3• 10 months ago

Seems like the kind of problems that would be amortized by scale. Anyone running a fleet won’t need to assemble one set of tooling per robot.

Animats4• 10 months ago

The sticker price might look cheap, but what I've heard from people actually looking to buy (even in large quantities) is that by the time you assemble the hardware and the tooling and the dev kit, the cost is $80-100k per robot.

I know. You don't get the GPU for AI in the base model, for example. Do you get the articulated hands?

A robot package with all those custom parts, motors, and motor controllers, along with cameras and a short range LIDAR. for only $22K is pretty good.[1] As this technology starts to work, it's apparently not going to be insanely expensive.

[1] https://robostore.com/products/unitree-g1-robotic-humanoid

matthewdgreen3• 10 months ago

It also tells a story about any US robotics company like Tesla now claims to be. How can you possibly hope to compete against manufacturing costs that low.

Palomides• 10 months ago

nobody has solved manipulation at any price point, you can't scale your way out of that

singularity2001• 10 months ago

more people can work on it.

His point was that mass production will make it more likely that someone will solve it

android521• 10 months ago

~"Brooks believes the sheer size of Nigeria is going to make it an economic and technological epicenter". I laughed when i read this. The sheer ignorance and false assumption that large population = epic economic powerhouse is ridiculous. I critize CCP a lot for various reasons but their effective and efficient governance over the last 40 years can not be easily replicated. Good governance is an incredibly rare asset. India has big pupulation but has no good governance. The chance of Nigeria having as good goverance as China is very close to zero.

comboy• 10 months ago

It's worth noting that China is investing heavily in Nigeria and it is also its biggest lender, it might turn out Nigeria's gov is not that far from CCP.

ACCount374• 10 months ago

China's third world investment adventures are questionable at best. And it would take extraordinary evidence for me to believe in Nigeria's government being competent.

davidCraigFergu• 10 months ago

Well since you, of all people, find it hilarious, and honored us with your iron clad, deeply reasoned opinion, it must be immutable truism

Time is not a linear function; creation and decay are not a normalized process. A large number of people can change inductive truism.

typpilol• 10 months ago

To be fair China has a top down control that India and the like don't

thisislife2• 10 months ago

India has big population but has no good governance.

As an Indian, I would dispute that. When I look back at what we were as a country, when we became independent, to what we are today, our achievements are really astounding.

HexDecOctBin2• 10 months ago

As an Indian, I would dispute that.

Don't. It's good for us that they overestimate China and underestimate us. For the next couple decades, we need breathing room to develop; why would you destroy that space by drawing attention to yourself?

supermatt6• 10 months ago

The parent has no clue what they are talking about, so I wouldn't take it to heart. Its pretty hard to deny that India is a global powerhouse.

spacebanana73• 10 months ago

India's economic development is centred on a narrow cone of progress around IT services/outsourcing/migration and the spending power that creates a set for consumers and government projects.

It's not comparable to the broad based productivity gains which happened in China or the UK across every industry as they developed, from agriculture to manufacturing to services. Instead it's much more like the Norwegian or Saudi hydrocarbon economies but with human capital exports.

bluGill12• 10 months ago

What you have achieved is astounding. However I agree that you don't have good governance, it isn't the worst by any means, but it is still pretty bad in ways. It has been getting better, and that is something I hope you keep working on - the world needs more good governance.

BTW, while I would call the US or EU better, both have very significant governance issues that they need to work on. This shouldn't be seen as a game of who is better it should be seen as a game of how can I improve, looking at others only to see what areas they are better you can copy, and what areas they are worse you can avoid.

Since I live in the US that is where I focus most of my efforts, and I'm constantly stopped by people who have their heart in the right place but are doing something that because of complex factors they refuse to acknowledge is worse than what we have now. I'm also constantly being informed of something I didn't think of and having to readjust what I advocate for. If you are not in the same situation you are making things worse!

handsclean• 10 months ago

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/GDP_per_...

elefanten• 10 months ago

Normalize that to global and it won’t look quite so stark. Not saying India’s development is unimpressive but let’s put things in a real context

impossiblefork3• 10 months ago

I agree about Nigeria but not about India. My understanding is that they have some very able people in government.

There are large countries in Africa that are undergoing fast development though, Kenya for example.

bluGill12• 10 months ago

There are 80 some countries in Africa (it has changed since I was in school as borders change). Some of them are doing really good, but most are doing bad. Many of them have seemed to be on the right track for a while and then fallen off again. I wish Kenya the best, but history on that continent hasn't been kind to anyone in my the last few hundred years (but go back farther...)

arthurofbabylon• 10 months ago

This reads as rather naive. You think India’s governance is “no good”? It is literally the most culturally complex place on earth, so you might need to recalibrate your metrics and criteria.

Additionally, if you believe Nigeria has a near zero chance at good governance, then I suspect you have not read very much history or anthropology. Every instance of civilizational development looks pretty much impossible, and yet “good governance” emerges over and over again. The story of humanity is one of surprising social innovation, and I would never count Nigeria out.

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

Why is it very close to zero? Nigerians in the United States are the most educated immigrant group in the country.

shreezus• 10 months ago

AGI doesn’t need to be “solved” for humanoid robots to be valuable at scale. The role of teleoperation is often underestimated; in the near term, many humanoids will likely be operated remotely by people halfway across the world, performing deliveries and other tasks cheaply.

lm284694• 10 months ago

Is that supposed to be something we want?

slaterbug2• 10 months ago

Honestly, it sounds like it would be really funny to me.

hamdingers• 10 months ago

Maybe not you, but the millions of people at risk of being run over by a forklift or buried in a ditch probably find the idea appealing.

BriggyDwiggs422• 10 months ago

How does that increase efficiency (beyond not having to pay normal wages)

dielotr• 10 months ago

There are plenty of jobs where 24/7 operation would be beneficial. Like a road paving crew, or a nighttime security guard. You can pay daytime wages for someone in another timezone.

Michelangelo11• 10 months ago

It’s simple intelligence, which is what we can do today and make reliable. It’s not sexy. It’s technology in the service of making things easier for workers and more efficient.

Perfection.

seydor• 10 months ago

Things like simple robot arms could do wonders in crucial sectors like construction and agriculture where most the world does not have the industrial solutions of the US. Depopulation and aging is causing massive abandonment of agriculture in europe for example. Indeed we don't need a humanoid to lay bricks, but a not-too-expensive device could help with the housing crisis.

You can do so much more computation, sensing, some actuation, but people underestimate the long tail of the natural environment.

Indeed, there are so many different application requirements that a single generic platform will never be possible. And humans are inefficient, so why do humanoids? We need a modular robotics platform backed by a big player/operating system

ChrisMarshallNY• 10 months ago

I really enjoyed this interview.

I didn't know that much about Dr. Brooks. Seems like a really practical, capable chap.

He also looks a lot like Asimov (at least, in that photo).

boredhedgehog• 10 months ago

We have affordances on the cart that lower the cognitive load. [...] In comparison, the state of the art is that people have scan guns, and on their wrists are tiny screens with character-based software—it’s ’80s or ’90s technology emulated on an Android device. They have to read that to know what bin number, what thing to do.

Which means the literate person will get fired and replaced with an illiterate, because all the robot needs is a compliant gripping tool.

Gud• 10 months ago

Why would that be better?

gosub100• 10 months ago

Going back to the tired quote about AI doing the dishes and laundry, fundamentally what IS so hard about making a robot that does that?

Is it the range of motion of my arm and hands? Is it computer vision not knowing the clearances of objects ? Even if the thing couldn't drive itself to the kitchen or laundry room, I would be fine wheeling it there and standing it in front of dirty clothes or dishes opening the appliance doors. But yet we don't have this.

Each individual problem is solved: we have water proof electronics, we have precise multi axis stepper motors, we have computer vision that can map 3D spaces. We could even sell custom dishwasher inserts that are designed to make it easier for the robot. Why the hell do I still have to do the dishes?

AlexandrB• 10 months ago

Reliable, general-purpose gripping is still an unsolved problem. Especially in the consumer space. Your body has the near-miraculous ability of repairing itself continuously. Most gripper technologies require regular maintenance or they start to fail: suction cups wear out, sandbags start to lose elasticity, rubber gripping points get worn smooth. In an industrial setting, this is something that's manageable with maintenance schedules and the like, but will consumers be happy to replace suction cups every month so their robot doesn't start dropping dishes on the floor?

callc• 10 months ago

The dexterity, ultra precise motor control, and senses of the human hands are the bottleneck. That’s my guess at least.

Seems like a fundamentally hard engineering problem. Evolution is mighty impressive!

vonneumannstan• 10 months ago

They're just a tired company not trying to innovate at all. My eufy is better at a fraction of the cost. How many versions of a robot vacuum can you make...

guywithahat• 10 months ago

Having interviewed at a few industrial robotics startups, I am concerned a bit for the short-term future of industrial robotics. Lots of companies by founders who have no real robotics experience, who seem to have lots of funding with no real customer base.

Not to long ago I interviewed with an embodied AI company who's founders were from the Google DNS team and had no real robotics experience. They were obsessed with graph theory which, while cool, is solved problem in the context of robotics and their startup. Another pitched itself as advanced AI but was just a camera and YOLO object detection. I worry there is going to be a harsh market readjustment.

arisAlexis• 10 months ago

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 10 months ago

"Rodney: That's why I'm skeptical of the Tesla taxi system. At the last earnings call, Elon said they're going to have safety drivers in the Teslas and they're hiring remote drivers. It's sort of a charade.

Rodney: I model myself as a realist. I've lived through so many hype cycles in AI. They weren't as big in public as this one, but they were brutal amongst AI practitioners. The arguments were strong and deeply held-screaming matches would happen. I've seen that happen again and again. Neural is ascendant at the moment, but neural was ascendant four or five times before and then got crushed. Something else took over, came back.

You can see that in agentic AI. [OpenAI promotion of "agentic AI" is currently on HN front page, directly adjacent to this submission.^1] Now suddenly everyone's got agent-based AI. They didn't have it six months ago. I suspect it's a little more marketing than reality. But when was the first paper on agentic AI published? It was in 1959 by Oliver Selfridge. There's been agent-based systems-SOAR, there's been lots. They come and go, all these ideas, and they get improved every time they come back. I'm not saying it's stupid, I'm just saying as someone who's been involved, it is not just the shiny new thing. This thing that looks shiny now may not be so shiny in a few years."

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45416080

RyanOD• 10 months ago

"It’s much easier to fund the promise than a real business, because real businesses have limitations on how fast they can grow. Whereas if you don’t know, you can live (and fund) the dream."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo

fennecbutt• 10 months ago

Says the guy whose robot vacuums only now don't drag dog shit across your house in a robotic square dance purely because they now have a camera that uses AI to detect such things.

iRobot Founder: Don't Believe the AI and Robotics Hype

Related Stories