Robot Reviews

Philip Adams of ABC Radio National's Late Night Live recently interviewed Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and head of MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab for a decade.

At one point in their discussion, Brooks acknowledged that the Koreans were coming up with a lot of competing vacuum cleaner products. You're probably familiar now with the Samsung Furot II, which was introduced in the recently held IFA electronics trade fair. 

Samsung is the world's largest conglomerate in terms of revenue and is very much Korean. In fact, South Korea has been once referred to as the Republic of Samsung. So with all the resources as well as vast technological history Samsung has, you can be sure the Furot II can very well pose a formidable challenge to the Roomba.

But that's not all you might want to hear.

When Colin Angle, iRobot's CEO, was interviewed some two months ago by Tom Ashbrook of OnPointRadio.org, it generated lots of reactions on that site (the comments are no longer visible now) both for and against his views. It therefore won't come as a surprise if Brooks' interview will be interesting enough also to draw highly opinionated individuals into the discussion.

So, although, yes, the Furot II's impending invasion is something to watch out for, you might still want to hear first what Brooks has to share regarding the general state of robotics; especially since, according to Adams, Brooks "wants to do to robots what Bill Gates did to the computers ... so affordable, so personal...."

You may listen to or download an mp3 file of Brooks' interview here.

If you want to hear more from him, check out this video: