With great expectations my coauthor, Tom Fitzgerald, and I sat down for a meeting with iRobot’s CEO. The time was early 2003 and, since just before Roomba’s launch the previous year, Tom and I had been working on a book titled Making… Read More »Dancing with Roomba, A History
Why I Love Technologies of All Sorts Mechanics As a child, I was fascinated by how things worked. All by themselves clocks kept time, radios made music, and rockets flew. Figuring out how such things functioned was my enduring compulsion. That and dreaming… Read More »The Joy of Techs
Where are all the robots? In my early career I had expected that behavior-based programming, the idea that made Roomba possible, would quickly lead to an avalanche of other robot applications. That hasn’t happened. And even in the case of Roomba, 16 years… Read More »Top Ten Things I Want Robots to Do
Our Kickstarter campaign had fulfilled, if not our wildest dreams, then at least our more rambunctious domesticated ones. We felt we had collected enough pledged funding to fill our backers’ orders. And we believed that our results constituted market validation—people wanted our… Read More »Funding Tertill
After trying and, sadly, failing to get our warehouse robot concept adopted by the industry, Harvest Automation retreated to serving our existing agricultural customers. Thirty or so nursery and greenhouse businesses across the US, plus a couple in foreign countries, needed spare… Read More »Harvest Automation Grape Cart
“Tertill wants to be built in China” is what I would confidently tell people. We knew that getting from a hand-crafted 3D-printed shell to a partnership with an overseas factory was going to be a journey with some twists and turns,… Read More »How We Built Tertills
Working on robots is fun. And building a robot that touches people’s lives and eases their burdens is satisfying in great measure. Such incentives lead many to consider a career in robotics. Because of my long residency in the field, aspiring roboticists often… Read More »Dare You Dance with the Robot?
Rory, Jay, John, and I were very enthusiastic about our new weeding robot. We envisioned Tertills rolling into gardens around the world, leaving in their wake weed-free soil and bountiful harvests. But before that could happen, we would need a… Read More »How We Kickstarted Tertill
Robots will grow our food. Or so futurists have predicted since the Art Deco era. And the vision is beguiling. In principle, robot farmers could control weeds without herbicides, they could maximize yields by attending to the needs of each plant individually, and they could… Read More »Robots Like Asparagus
[Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4] Around 2012, six years after Harvest’s founders left iRobot in search of the next big thing, we reached a perplexing impasse. We’d discovered an application that aligned wonderfully with robots’ abilities, we had built a robot… Read More »Harvest Automation, Part 3
By tenth grade, I had it figured. I’d been captivated by science and technology since before I could remember. My formative years were spent experimenting, building electrical and mechanical things, and dreaming of traveling in space. Thinking carefully about how I might best… Read More »The Myth of the Planned Career