IRobot Corporation

iRobot is an innovative company based in Burlington, Mas-sachusetts, that makes robots for home use (the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner and its floor-washing cousin Scooba) to military robots such as various PackBot models designed for reconnaissance, bomb disposal, and other dan-gerous tasks.

iRobot was founded by robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab (see Brooks, Rodney) and two former MIT students, Helen Greiner and Colin Angle. The company was founded in 1991 and incorporated in 2000. Its first product was My Real Baby, a realistic (and complicated) animated doll that proved to be too expen-sive for the toy market. Roomba, on the other hand, was released in 2002 and has met with considerable success—2 million units had been sold by May 2006. Besides Scooba, Roomba has been joined by Dirt Dog (a workshop cleaner and picker-upper) and Verro, a pool cleaner. iRobot has also produced an educational/hobby robot called iRobot Create. iRobot has done considerable work for the military, based on work in the 1990s with robots that crawled or rolled on tanklike tracks and were equipped with grasping devices and other attachments. The PackBot series comes in models adaptable to a variety of military tasks, and has been used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In 2007 iRobot released a redesigned, more durable version of Roomba. Meanwhile cofounder Colin Angle has said that the company is looking at many exciting future applications, including industrial cleaning, mining, and oil exploration. In the home, Roomba may be joined by out-door robots that can mow the lawn and trim the hedges.

iRobot is a midsized company whose revenue has grown from $54.3 million in 2003 to $227 million in 2007, with a gross profit of $82.6 million and 423 employees.