Yet, the deluge of Jetsonian headlines celebrating Roomba's arrival presented iRobot with an unusual challenge. The company needs Roomba to be first and foremost an appliance: an attractive alternative to uprights and dust-busters, practical to the point of mundaneness. To be seen as innovative is grand: to be a novelty is dangerous. The last thing Angle wants is for Roomba to become the Internet refrigerator of vacuum cleaners.
For that reason, the product's robotic pedigree was potentially troubling. It's no accident that the word robot -- evocative of homicidal cyborgs and space-age valets -- isn't uttered once in the company's 30-minute infomercial. Nor does it appear on the first iteration of the product's packaging, except as part of iRobot's name. Instead, the company describes its baby as an "intelligent floorvac system." "Most people would go to the market saying, 'We're the best in the world at artificial intelligence! We know more than you do and robots are the answer!'" says MIT's Bund. "Instead they're using consumers' terms. They're not letting their technical egos get in the way of communicating."
But obfuscation is already on the wane. Reassured by letters, e-mail, and Web forum comments from customers largely tickled by the product's cyber self (60% of Roomba owners name them, says Angle), the company will use the word robot in packaging hitting the shelves this summer. And in the months to come it will ramp up marketing campaigns aimed at explaining and, ultimately, celebrating its robot technology. The reason for the shift is impending competition. Electrolux, for one, has developed a robot vacuum that has so far been kept at bay by its high price (around $1,500). Once competitive products get cheaper, iRobot can win only if consumers have learned to value robotic characteristics and, thus, prefer to buy vacuums from robot experts rather than robots from vacuum experts. "As competitors come in, our amount of robot expertise equity becomes more important," says White.
Even as it has funneled resources Roomba-ward, iRobot has not abandoned its contract industrial and military divisions, which Greiner runs. There, hard-core innovators can still be found building everything from self-driving vehicles to the burly Packbot reconnaissance robots that got their close-up in Afghanistan and Iraq. And, of course, all three divisions share technology among themselves at will.
That goes for blue-sky research as well. The federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, is funding iRobot's Swarm project, designed to get robots to coordinate among themselves and act as a group. One recent morning senior lead research scientist James McLurkin and software engineer Jennifer Smith demonstrated the technology on a herd of softball-size robots resembling silver Dumpsters frosted with Christmas lights. At the command of McLurkin's controller, the lead robot, marked by an antenna, scuttled forward; it then sent a message commanding six more bots to fall into line behind it. "DARPA wants us to work on exploration behaviors," says McLurkin, "getting 100 of them to spread out, look for open space, stake out the ground, and find some object of interest." Applications include clearing mines and locating the wounded.
But they also include housework. Angle proposes using Swarm's programming in a line of cheap domestic robots. Such appliances could decide among themselves, for example, which gets first crack at the family room: the carpet sweeper or the waxer. And, of course, all of iRobot's appliances would be compatible with one another, a strategy that could potentially give iRobot a Microsoftian advantage. "Having the robots talk to each other allows us to take on more of the home-cleaning task $200 at a time," Angle says.
Angle, in other words, still envisions his robots touching the world -- the dusty, linty, crumb-crusted bits of it anyway. And now he is looking for fulfillment elsewhere too. With their management team in place and a steady stream of revenue, all three of iRobot's founders are, after more than a decade, reclaiming their personal lives. Greiner recently bought a house. Angle, who sacrificed his first marriage to the start-up, has an eight-month-old daughter with his second wife, a psychiatrist.
As for Brooks, he spends the equivalent of just one day a week at the company, devoting the rest of his time to the AI Lab, where he's moved onto projects more humanoid than entomological. Now that, after all these years, he's finally building robots that affect people's lives, does he still have a dream? "I want to build a robot that someone would feel morally aghast at switching off because it would be like killing a life form," says Brooks. "That's not a commercial dream. But it's my dream."
