The next challenge of a robot engineer who invented "Rumba"

In 1988, when Joe Jones was studying small robots at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (currently MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Institute: CSAIL), he came up with an interesting idea."I was interested in a very small reflective behavior robot and thought that this type of robot should be able to do a lot. For example, it should be possible to make a robot to clean the floor," said Jones.To tell.

Jones began making floor cleaning robots on LEGO, named Rug Warrior, and participated in the robot Olympics.

Three years later, he started working at Denning Mobile Robotics and brought this idea there.He has developed a prototype with his colleagues, Jack SHIMECK, to demonstrate the concept.Later, they showed the idea of the idea of the "RoboBroom" idea to the company."We thought this would work," he said.

Ten days later, they were both fired.

"I thought this product could not be a thing, and we thought we were just playing with toys. It was the company's idea that real robots were big and expensive."

Jones did not fall into this setback.A few months later, in February 1992, he was hired by IROBOT.The company was established when Colin Angle (one of the three founders of the company) signed a $ 20,000 contract with a Japanese company to make a small robot.Jones was the first full -time employee of the company.About 15 years later, when Jones quit the company, there were 300 employees and nearly 600 at the peak.

However, early IROBOT was in a financially difficult situation."Angle often said that the company had never had cash for the first two years at the end of the month," said Jones.

"I want to add that there were sometimes there was no enough cash at the end of the month."

Despite this situation, IROBOT colleagues were able to fulfill the development of this robot in 1999, despite the fact that the IROBOT colleagues were favored by the ideas of the floor cleaning robot.At that time, the number of employees was 20.Jones and colleagues Paul Sandin worked in "ROOMBA" (Rumba) for three years from that point, and the completed product was released in 2002.

"I didn't get my neck at this time" (Jones)

ROOMBA is one of the most famous home robots and has been sold over 10 million units worldwide.Despite the company's growth, Jones was not settled."IROBOT has succeeded in ROOMBA, and shortly later succeeded in a military robot called Packbot," he said.For this reason, IROBOT continued to invest in small robots."But I thought the robot would be the next great success," he said.

"One of the ROOMBA problems is that if you develop a robot that cleans the floor, what to make next is what to make. Is it a window wiping robot? Is it a toilet cleaning robot?They have nothing to do with cleaning, and they have to start developing with zero. The only way to pursue what they want to do is to quit IROBOT. "

In 2006, Jones persuaded some colleagues to establish a new company, HARVEST AUTOMATION.At this company, they created robots for greenhouse cultivation agriculture."Agriculture is related to technology. If you create a robot for something, you can create a robot for another job."