iRobot (manufacturer of Roomba and Scooba)

The iRobot Corporation, based in Burlington, Massachusetts, is a public corporation NASDAQ: and major designer of robots for businesses, homes, and institutions. iRobot's best known product is the Roomba, an autonomous home vacuum cleaner. The company also makes a line of PackBots, robots for use with bomb squads, SWAT teams or the Military.

The three iRobot founders - Rodney Brooks, Colin Angle and Helen Greiner - were inspired to found the company after working in MIT's artificial intelligence lab. Rodney Brooks is currently the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

History

iRobot was founded in 1990 and in 2000 it was incorporated in Delaware. The company lost money every year from it's inception to 2003 [2]. The company went public on November 9, 2005 and raised $120 million by selling 5 million shares at $24 [3]. iRobot built a number of remote telepresence robots for both the commercial and home use, for which there turned out to be almost no market.

Home robots

In 2000, iRobot moved into the toy business with "My Real Baby." This product is a highly realistic doll which uses animatronic facial expressions. The doll started out as an emotionally expressive and responsive robot called "IT." The finalized My Real Baby was made in a partnership with Hasbro, but is no longer in production.

iRobot released its Roomba floorvac robot in 2002. Since Roomba's successful launch into the home robots market other companies have launched their own automatic vacuum cleaners, including Sharper Image's eVac.

In May 2005 iRobot introduced their newest robot, Scooba. It is similar to the Roomba except that it uses water to clean hard floors and replaces mops and buckets. The product will be commercially available in the 2005 holiday season.

Commercial and military robots

iRobot has an extensive line of robots designed for use in military or policing function.

• Genghis (1990) was iRobot's first robot. It was designed as a test platform for researchers. The robot is currently at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
• Ariel (1996) is a crab like robot designed to remove mines (in and out of water).
• Urbie (1997) was a proof of concept robot designed for urban environments. The platform was designed with two tank-like tracks so it could climb stairs.
• PackBot Scout is a rugged military surveillance robot which is designed to be deployed by a single soldier to investigate areas which may be dangerous or inaccessible. Using a still camera the robot beams images back to the controller. The robot has been used in both Iraq and Afghanistan. PackBot research is supported by DARPA.
• PackBot Explorer is an advanced Scout with sound, live video feed and other sensors. The robot is designed for investigating hostage situations or surveying battle damage.
• Swarm is an artificial intelligence research project designed to develop algorithms for swarms of hundreds of individual robots. This project is sponsored by DARPA.