Roomba vs Autonomous Vehicles: Vision not Lidar is the Future for Robotics - iRobot CEO | AI Clip
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00:00:02.580 | - Another industry in which, I would say,
00:00:10.480 | the only other industry in which there is automation
00:00:14.780 | actually touching people's lives today
00:00:17.760 | is autonomous vehicles.
00:00:19.400 | What the vision you just described of using computer vision
00:00:25.240 | and using cheap camera sensors,
00:00:27.360 | there's a debate on that of LIDAR versus computer vision.
00:00:31.200 | And sort of, Elon Musk famously said
00:00:36.200 | that LIDAR is a crutch that really,
00:00:39.400 | camera in the long term, camera only, is the right solution,
00:00:43.760 | which echoes some of the ideas you're expressing.
00:00:46.420 | Of course, the domain in terms of its safety criticality
00:00:49.720 | is different, but what do you think about that approach
00:00:53.600 | in the autonomous vehicle space?
00:00:56.360 | And in general, do you see a connection
00:00:58.080 | between the incredible real world challenges
00:01:01.440 | you have to solve in the home with Roomba?
00:01:03.680 | And I saw a demonstration of some of them,
00:01:05.840 | corner cases, literally, and autonomous vehicles.
00:01:10.760 | - So there's absolutely a tremendous overlap
00:01:14.560 | between both the problems, you know,
00:01:18.560 | robot vacuum and autonomous vehicle are trying to solve,
00:01:21.560 | and the tools and the types of sensors
00:01:24.740 | that are being applied in the pursuit of the solutions.
00:01:29.600 | In my world, my environment is actually much harder
00:01:35.920 | than the environment in automobile travels.
00:01:40.200 | We don't have roads, we have t-shirts, we have steps,
00:01:45.200 | we have a near infinite number of patterns and colors
00:01:50.280 | and surface textures on the floor.
00:01:53.080 | - Especially from a visual perspective.
00:01:55.440 | - Yeah, visually it's really tough.
00:01:57.640 | - Is infinitely variable.
00:02:01.760 | - On the other hand, safety is way easier on the inside.
00:02:05.440 | My robots, they're not very heavy, they're not very fast.
00:02:10.440 | If they bump into your foot, you think it's funny.
00:02:14.360 | And, you know, and autonomous vehicles
00:02:19.820 | kind of have the inverse problem.
00:02:22.300 | And so that for me saying vision is the future,
00:02:27.300 | I can say that without reservation.
00:02:30.680 | For autonomous vehicles, I think I believe what
00:02:35.640 | Elon's saying about the future is ultimately
00:02:40.460 | gonna be vision.
00:02:41.920 | Maybe if we put a cheap lighter on there
00:02:43.920 | as a backup sensor, it might not be
00:02:45.640 | the worst idea in the world.
00:02:46.700 | - So the stakes are much higher.
00:02:47.880 | - The stakes are much higher.
00:02:48.720 | - You have to be much more careful thinking through
00:02:51.080 | how far away that future is.
00:02:53.620 | - Right, but I think that the primary
00:02:57.120 | environmental understanding sensor
00:03:02.220 | is going to be a visual system.
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