iRobot's CEO argues that computer vision, not lidar, is the future for robotics. He notes that indoor spaces are harder to perceive visually than roads, but the stakes are lower than autonomous vehicles, where lidar might work as a backup sensor.
Foreign, Which I would say the only other industry in which there, 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, that's. There's a debate on that of lidar versus computer vision. And sort of the Elon Musk famously said that lidar is a crutch that really in 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, a 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. So the way it looks, 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 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 going to be vision. Maybe if you put a cheap lidar 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 feature is. Right. But I think that the primary environmental understanding sensor is going to be a visual system.
