thoughts to blog

TurtleBot and Entrepreneurial Ideas

While at drop.io, I acquired an iRobot Create and a netbook to put together a simple telepresence robot. Here’s the original post (with bad links, just for reference). It was a fun experiment and I actually published the code out on github (here). You could use any OSC, hardware or software controller, or a regular telnet prompt to control movement.

At any rate, when drop.io was acquired, I was searching for the next thing to do. With the advice of some of my techy friends, they said I should try to build up and sell an “SDK” and kit for building a small telepresence robot, consisting of an iRobot Create and a netbook. At the time I thought it would be interesting, but would require capital up front to purchase inventory and I didn’t think it would eventually make much profit. But it would be fun.

Sometimes life gets in the way and you make up your own excuses on why you shouldn’t do things. It’s silly, but it’s a part of being human. As an entrepreneur, you have to ignore those excuses and push forward fast. Iterate, push, and go for the glory.

In this case, I caved to my pressures and silly excuses and decided to pursue other interests…

Fast foward to today and I saw a press release how an amazing company, Willow Garage, is going to sell kits for small robot platforms. And guess what, it has an iRobot Create and a netbook. With an addition of a Kinect device, you have TurtleBot, an incredibly powerful and affordable robotics system.

I missed the boat.

That’s part of being an entrepreneur. You have to quickly pick up on your good ideas and move forward. Of course I could still pursue the same route, but I actually was going to bundle ROS and a Kinect anyway, which is exactly the TurtleBot.

Good luck to those guys, as it’s a great idea and I’m glad that someone else was thinking in the same direction at the same time, which is also a part of being an entrepreneur; validation.

UPDATE

Found another company doing the same thing: bilibot

Cool stuff!