Like Roomba more than a decade later, the insect robots piqued the media's fancy. Angle's senior project, an ambulatory critter called Genghis, made the cover of Popular Science before retiring to the Smithsonian. Brooks, meanwhile, was featured in Errol Morris's documentary Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, a panegyric to obsession and human striving in which he shared screen time with a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, and a connoisseur of naked mole rats.
In 1990, Brooks -- then 35 -- and Angle used credit cards and bank debt to launch iRobot from a small apartment in Somerville, Mass. (Helen Greiner, another graduate of the AI Lab, joined them shortly thereafter.) Brooks assumed the title of chairman, and Angle declared himself president. Forgoing sleep and salaries and putting their personal lives on hold, the founders pursued one overarching goal: to build robots that would touch people's lives. But at first the only lives touched were those of other students of robotics, who used the start-up's products for their own experiments.
Now, as growth markets go, building robots for robotics-studies programs isn't one. Soon iRobot was seeking government contracts and, later, corporate work. A list of its projects over the next decade is as eclectic and lacking in direction as a freshman's course schedule. The company's growing cadre of engineers built nuclear-waste detectors and industrial floor waxers and timid toy balls that whimpered when rolled into dark corners. Each project became a division; those divisions multiplied to as many as 12, dwindled to a handful, and then swelled as customers chose to manufacture, scrap, or back-burner their prototypes. The goal of such diversity was to mitigate risk. "We had our fingers in all these pies because we had no killer pie," Angle says. "And we didn't know how to decide what a killer pie was other than to let Darwin do it.
"Focusing this company too early," says the CEO, "would have killed it."
The eclecticism of iRobot may have saved it from the fate of some Internet companies, which assumed the mere existence of their technology would somehow will a market into being. But it also allowed the business to store up a trove of intellectual property. The importance of IP was brought home early to Angle, who in 1992 negotiated away the rights to a robot called Grendel to one of his customers. "We had to segregate that whole product line and make sure that other derivative products followed a different technology path so that [the customer] wouldn't end up owning a big chunk of what we did," says Angle. "It was very scary stuff, but it was a good early lesson."
It's a lesson many never learn: Small contractors routinely cede valuable patents and trade secrets to their larger customers. After Grendel, however, iRobot insisted on retaining the rights to all technology developed during a project, except for a few well-defined applications specified by the client. Most customers were willing to go along with that, so long as they could benefit from R&D done on someone else's dime. "The ability to draw on IP developed elsewhere became part of the story we tell, part of what we sell," says Angle. It also left the company free to use the fruits of its earlier labors -- specifically, cleaning technology developed for Johnson Wax Professional and tiny processors created for Hasbro -- in Roomba and its anticipated sister products.
The company's diversity made it flexible; its intellectual capital made it strong. But to bring its robots to a wider audience, iRobot needed to be one more thing: cheap. For a contractor used to spending tens -- sometimes hundreds -- of thousands of dollars on envelope-shoving prototypes, that wasn't easy. "This is my monument to not understanding the realities of the world," says Angle, taking down from a shelf a plastic-molded tableau in which a half dozen cartoonishly costumed figures surround what looks like a child's book. "It's a storytelling machine. We developed a scripting language so that you could write something -- 'King Croft turned to Jenny and said, "I'll get you"' -- and the characters would actually turn and make the right gestures and the lights would come up and there would be dialogue. It was unbelievably cool."
The management at Hasbro -- to whom Angle presented the prototype in 1996 -- agreed. But then Angle opened it up and showed off the innards. "The unit price on the microprocessors was $60 each," says the CEO. "This flash card was something like $400. Just the parts were $3,000. We thought there was some magical thing where you could give this to the toy industry, and they would say, 'Here's your royalty,' and it would turn up on the shelves at Toys "R" Us for $19.95.
"We were profoundly shot down," he adds unnecessarily.
Still, in 1998 Hasbro agreed to fund an R&D team at iRobot and became its exclusive partner in the toy industry. For two years, as his engineers pitched ideas for toy concepts and technologies, Angle got religion on cost control. The catalyst was rejection: dozens of thumbs-downs on technically elegant -- but way too expensive -- projects such as board games that interacted with players and balls and bats that understood how they were being used. "The first time it happened it was unbearably painful," says Angle. "By the fifth time, the engineers learned to maintain some emotional distance, which allowed them to broaden their attention as to what makes the project rewarding."
What makes the project rewarding, the toy group decided, was seeing it on a store shelf. One product -- the emotionally responsive doll My Real Baby -- finally made it to market in 2000; iRobot technologies turned up in a variety of the toymaker's offerings as well. Those all came about because the engineers promoted cost to priority one. They sourced materials aggressively. They learned to make robotics with plastics rather than with expensive machined aluminum. Detailed bills of material began showing up in every product pitch. To keep itself focused, the group adopted a mantra: "We have no money."
