(gentle music) - Another industry in which, I would say, the only other industry in which there is automation actually touching people's lives today is autonomous vehicles. What the vision you just described of using computer vision and using cheap camera sensors, there's a debate on that of LIDAR versus computer vision.

And sort of, Elon Musk famously said that LIDAR is a crutch that really, camera in the long term, camera only, is the right solution, which echoes some of the ideas you're expressing. Of course, the domain in terms of its safety criticality is different, but what do you think about that approach in the autonomous vehicle space?

And in general, do you see a connection between the incredible real world challenges you have to solve in the home with Roomba? And I saw a demonstration of some of them, corner cases, literally, and autonomous vehicles. - So there's absolutely a tremendous overlap between both the problems, you know, robot vacuum and autonomous vehicle are trying to solve, and the tools and the types of sensors that are being applied in the pursuit of the solutions.

In my world, my environment is actually much harder than the environment in automobile travels. We don't have roads, we have t-shirts, we have steps, we have a near infinite number of patterns and colors and surface textures on the floor. - Especially from a visual perspective. - Yeah, visually it's really tough.

- Is infinitely variable. - On the other hand, safety is way easier on the inside. My robots, they're not very heavy, they're not very fast. If they bump into your foot, you think it's funny. And, you know, and autonomous vehicles kind of have the inverse problem. And so that for me saying vision is the future, I can say that without reservation.

For autonomous vehicles, I think I believe what Elon's saying about the future is ultimately gonna be vision. Maybe if we put a cheap lighter on there as a backup sensor, it might not be the worst idea in the world. - So the stakes are much higher. - The stakes are much higher.

- You have to be much more careful thinking through how far away that future is. - Right, but I think that the primary environmental understanding sensor is going to be a visual system. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)