Your personal robot is here, and she’s ready to run your life.
By Michael Sitver, Founder of Letters.io
In 1962 The Jetsons first aired, promising robots that would manage every detail of our lives. Now, 53 years later, Robotbase CEO Duy Huynh wants to make that dream a reality, and he just might do it.
Duy Huynh was just 19 when he dropped out of the University of Maryland’s PHD program to pursue his passion, smart technology.
Now, age 31, Huynh is founder of a robotics company Robotbase, which just unveiled its first robot this month.
The simply named “Personal Robot” debuted at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and has sold $160,000 in pre-orders on Kickstarter in the 30 days since. In addition, Huynh lined up eight angel investors to fund development and production of his bot. Here’s my interview with Huynh.
Sections:
- What are Personal Robots?
- How To Build A Robot (and a company)
- Safety And Security: From the NSA to the Robot Apocalypse
- Post-interview Reflections
1. Personal Robots.
Tell me about your robot. What does it do? How will it affect how we live?
The personal computer was the first [major technological] shift. The smart phone was the second one. Both of them changed the way we worked and lived, however these 2 devices are still pretty passive. They take instructions from us, and they perform a task.
The personal robot is the next step. it’s a thinking machine. it will still take instructions from you, but it also can think and act autonomously.
For example, while you’re away, it will navigate around your house autonomously and use all of its sensors to monitor the house. A computer can’t do this. A phone can’t do this. You have a living and thinking machine now to watch the house for you.
We’re not just building a product. We’re building a platform. With our open SDK, developers can build more apps for the robots. They will become more capable and helpful over time, and that will affect every vertical — not just home, but will be also retail, hospital, senior home, public spaces, etc.
Let’s say I already have all kinds of smart home gadgets and automated systems (I do). Why do I need a personal robot?
You need a robot because she’s your ultimate (physical) personal assistant, something that is entirely different from anything you’ve seen before her.
At your next family gatherings, you don’t have to go around and take photos; you’ll have “someone” go around autonomously, identifying smiling faces, and capturing key moments for you, so you can truly enjoy the moments rather than trying to capture it.
At lunch time, she’ll come over and ask you if you want to order “Caesar salad” because she remembers that you’ve had so much food in the last few days, and she want you to stay healthy. Before dinner, she’ll walk you through cooking a recipe step-by-step, while your hands are busy cooking.
At night time, she’ll read a story to your kids at the same time reflecting the light color mood of the room. While you’re traveling, she patrols around the house, using all her sensors to watch the house for you, every corner of it. While you’re in a hotel room, you can telepresence into her to stay in touch with your family or into a meeting at work with your workers, as if you’re there.
During a meeting, she captures notes and reminds you when your next meeting is, who you’re meeting with, and what that person just shared on Twitter or Facebook, and, as I said, we have an open SDK, so developers can build more apps for you. Your robot will become more capable and helpful with each passing day.
Are you using your personal robot at home yet?
We still haven’t finished all of the features we want yet, so I’m still testing it (using it at home) with only a small set of features.
Right now, the feature that I use the most is smart home automation. Since the personal robot has Z-Wave, ZigNee, ble [popular wireless standards for smart home devices], and Wi-Fi, it can interface with almost any connected devices on the market. My robot has begun to understand my habits and preferences and perform certain tasks autonomously.
Have you named your robot?
Yes. Maya.
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2. How To Build A Robot (and a company)
Is this your first company?
Duy Huynh: No. I started a couple. Some of them are still running successfully as lifestyle businesses. One of them, Deck Tiles changes how people build decks, by making beautiful deck design easy. We have sold millions of deck tiles around the world.
Deck tiles are a long way from robots. Where did you come up with the idea for Robotbase (your latest company)?
In 2004, I started working at Fujitsu lab of America. That was the first time I worked with home automation & connected devices (it was super early back then). Since then, I’ve remained passionate about smart and connected device.
I have pretty much every connected device that has come on the market since 2004 at home, and I play with them often. I’m also passionate about artificial intelligence (AI), and about a year ago I realized that AI could help tremendously in the Internet Of Things(IOT) space, so we start building the robot, both as a software and a hardware platform.
Alright. You have the idea. Now how did you turn that into a product, and a company?
Building a robot requires a lot of moving parts coming together. You have to handle hardware, electronics, software, mechanical design, user experience, manufacturing, and distribution. It’s like you’re running seven different companies!
if you look at each individual task (take software for example), the process is very similar to how you run would run a normal software project. The difference is that you have to make sure all these pieces fit together at the same time.
Did you already know your founding team, or did you meet them while developing your bot?
The founding team has been with me for over 3 years now, and we know each other well and work well with each other.
So, what was the hardest part of developing your robot?
The software. AI is just… really hard. We’re very fortunate that there has been a lot of groundbreaking academic research in the last few years, especially related to deep learning. Work from NYU, Stanford, University of Toronto, and University of Montreal has been especially helpful. We have learned a lot from their work and implemented their innovations in our robots.
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3. Safety and Security: From The NSA To The Robot Apocalypse
Some people cringe at the very idea of an artificially intelligent robot. Quirky even built an entire ad campaign around the idea. Why should I feel comfortable with this robot in my house?
A small group of people says so. We ignore them. We care about the rest of the world, the majority of the population that would love this.
When you work on a major shift, you’ll always get push-back. The key thing is to focus on your customers and on the people who share the same vision with you. That’s our singular focus.
Quirky is a great company, but I think that ad is misleading. Their campaign is for their Smart Home hub. To me, a Smart Home hub is a feature, not a product. I predict their product will die within the next 12 months. Think of a Smart Home hub as portable GPSs were 10 years ago. It was just a feature masquerading as a product. See where it is now?
Elon Musk recently said that AI research is “summoning a demon”. Don’t you think it’s risky to endow computers with so much new logic, and adaptability?
I strongly disagree with Elon musk. “Robot intelligence” is very different from “human intelligence”. I think trying to mimic human intelligence is a mistake. Robots have their own way of looking at things and serve different purposes, so I don’t think comparing “robot intelligence” to “human intelligence” is applicable here.
I also think we’re hundreds of years from that happening (robots becoming smart enough to kill humans). Right now, the benefits outweigh the risks.
In order for your robot to be valuable, we (the users) have to give it access to an enormous amount of personal data, from maps of our home and office to information about our friends, and our dietary habits.
That’s really personal stuff. How are you securing your bots against cybercriminals, and the government (i.e the NSA)?
We take security very seriously. Only the people you grant access to will be able to control the devices. so even with 3rd party developers, you have to grant access to their apps, so that they can work with your devices.
We use state-of-the-art encryption between the robot and all your devices, also between the robot and our servers, as well as between the mobile remote control app and our server.
We’re using Amazon Web Services and implementing multiple layers of isolation for security reasons. We have an always-running monitoring algorithm to detect anomalies, so if we detect certain strange behaviors, we can immediately take action and alert you.
We even have built-in facial recognition, so if someone is in your house and try to control the robot, it will recognize the stranger and notify you immediately.
** Interested in the future? Also read about the 3D Printer that can print drones**
You mentioned that you store user data on your servers (although they’re controlled by Amazon). Uber recently got into trouble for the access employees had to sensitive customer data. What do you have access to?
We have access to user data, but only with their permission.
We’ve covered the present very well. Let’s talk a bit about the future. What superpowers might a robot have in the near future? Could we one day see mind-reading robots?
Possibly– I’m serious. Mind-reading, to me, is pattern recognition based on various contextual parameters. The computer is able to remember, measure, and recognize thousands of parameters that humans can’t. Based on that exponential number of contextual parameters measured, robot may be able to tell “what state” the human is in at a certain point.
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4. Post-interview Reflections
I’m convinced. Robots are coming. Still, I don’t know how much of their lives Americans are willing to hand over to robots.
Price, perhaps the biggest reason that Americans haven’t brought the robot into the home in recent years, is no longer an issue. At $10,000 a piece, only the wealthiest futurists would ever own a robot. At $1,000, where many new entrants to the market are being priced today, robots cost what digital cameras, computers, smartphones, and flat-screen TVs cost when they first saw widespread use.
The true challenge for the robot industry will be convincing Americans that they need a robot, and that they can feel safe around robots. Personally, I feel the robot is a product that sells itself. Companies that produce attractive robots — robots that appeal to real needs — will see exponential sales growth, because people will learn about it, and become more comfortable as they see more and more of their friends buying robots.
In all honesty, I wouldn’t buy one of Duy’s personal robots right now, nor could I imagine using one for more than a month. I just don’t need most of the things a roving artificially intelligent assistant provides, and I question whether the technology has developed enough to be worth $1000 to me.
Still, some of the use cases he described sounded incredibly helpful. I like the idea of a roving, artificially intelligent robot at parties, for catching smiling photographs effortlessly. I love the idea of a robot that guards my home while I’m away, and alerts me to threats. I also love what other companies and makers have done with robotics, like iRobot’s Roomba vacuum bot.
I do believe in the robot dream, but I think there are many questions left to answer. Should we own one or two robots that do every task, or several small robots each with individual tasks (like the Roomba)? Should our robots have personality, and artificial intelligence (like Duy’s robot, and the robots in the classic animated film “Wall-E”) or should they be dumb, hard-programmed to do their task without any interaction? Are there safety concerns associated with developing Artificial Intelligence further?
No matter what the answers to those questions are, I’m excited to see how far consumer robotics has come in these last decade, and I look forward to seeing what Duy, and his competitors do in the next decade. Here’s to the era of the personal robot!
Sincerely,
Michael Sitver
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Editorial Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and structure. The order of questions has been rearranged as well, to provide a consistent flow.
Originally published at letters.io on February 9, 2015.
