But it seemed to me that, yeah, with a little bit more engineering you could actually build something and it wouldn’t cost that much. It sort of worked! It didn’t fulfill my hopes that I could use it to actually clean my apartment because it wasn’t rugged enough, wasn’t robust enough. And I built a little sweeping mechanism that started off with a model brush that I chopped up in a certain way and glued gears to. I was living alone - 36 at the time, no spring chicken - and put together a little robot, made mostly of Lego with some microprocessors and some switches and a bumper to make it turn away from any obstacle it would hit. Where were you when you first conceived of a floor-cleaning robot? Jones, now 63, the author of three books and the holder of more than two-dozen patents, walked us through the process of developing a product that would sweep a nation. From conception to final product, the long journey of the Roomba is one of rejection, setbacks, failures, patience, fortuitous events, and, ultimately, triumph in the form of adorable autonomous tidiness. One early boss, who was highly unimpressed, accused Jones of “playing with toys.” Some months, he couldn’t afford his mortgage. But getting the “Dust Puppy,” as it was once known, to market, turned out to be a decade-long lesson in humility.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |