Building a Service Robotics Business—Challenges from the Field

Over the years of prototyping home, service, and assistive robots at Willow Garage and more recent years of deploying real service robots at Savioke, we have identified and begun surmounting many challenges in the road ahead toward a future of human-robot interaction. In this talk, I will share more than few of the stories and lessons learned from our experiences. First, these robots need a purpose; they need to provide value to specific people in concrete ways. Beware of novelty effects. Second, especially in the domain of service and consumer robotics, the social skills of the robots are inherently critical aspects of the robots’ ability to function. Socially inappropriate robots get shoved aside, abandoned, and hijacked. Third, building a truly interdisciplinary team has been an incredibly powerful way forward to designing, deploying, and iteratively improving upon building robotic products and services that people actually want to use. Respecting and leveraging the diverse skills on real product teams makes all the difference. Getting robots out of factory cages and into the hands of real end-users takes much more than just a single company. It takes a community. The human-robot interaction community is critical to the success of inventing this future of robotics that supports real human needs, enabling everyday people to benefit from the advances in robotics.