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While a student at MIT, Colin Angle passed by a lab managed by Professor Rodney Brooks. And Brooks picked Angle to help him on a summer robotics project. The end result, unfurled in 1990, was a crab-like walking robot called Genghis. The project helped Brooks get tenure and Angle into grad school.
But rather than go to grad school, Angle started a company with Brooks. They later linked up with Helen Grenier, and their efforts became iRobot, one of the early standouts in what appears to be a growing market for autonomous robots. The company has shipped 1.2 million Roombas, a robotic vacuum cleaner that sells for around $300. iRobot has also created a military robot called the PackBot and is crafting a reconnaissance vehicle with mower king John Deere. Later this year, Scooba, a robotic mopper, will hit the market.
Angle, the company's CEO, met recently with News.com to demonstrate the next version of the Roomba and talk about the future of the robotics market.
Q: When you talked to News.com a year ago, robotics were still something of an oddity. Now there seems to be a lot more enthusiasm. Is the market taking off?
Angle: I think it's still young as an industry, certainly. If you view the practical robot market--that is, robots that are not humanoid or robots created for the sake of it--there may be five or six companies making lawn mowers. There's probably a dozen companies making vacuums, but no one anywhere near the scale that Roomba has been able to achieve at this point. There are a lot of industry analysts that are all very bullish on where it's going.
The U.N. report on robotics sees a sevenfold increase in robots from 2004 to 2007, and there are some Japanese people talking about 39 million household robots by 2010. iRobot has shipped 1.2 million Roombas.
Who is in second place?
Angle: Well, Electrolux, with maybe 40,000. Second place is not well defined yet, but it is true that there's a lot of really high-power interest in this today. I know a bunch of venture funds that have money set aside for robots and are looking for good companies. You're going to see some other good management teams being formed around...robotics.
Are your competitors going to come from university labs or established companies?
Angle: It's going to be hard to do exactly what we did and create an integrated system and establish a national brand and a national distribution platform. I think that there's an opportunity for companies to piggyback on top of iRobot platforms. The Roomba has a serial port, and we'll be announcing an API of sorts for it, so that you could create accessories for the Roomba if you wanted. If you did that, you'd have a solid base of over a million users.
There are a variety of different add-ons for the PackBot. The (reticulating) arm is a payload--it just bolts on. The fiber-optic spooler is a payload that bolts on, and there (are) various sensor heads. We did a payload where we took a company's chemical/biological sensors and then interfaced that to the PackBot. There was an issue where they were finding what might have been mass gravesites, and there were real concerns these sites were protected by toxic chemical or biohazardous stuff or perhaps even nuclear-reactive things to (keep) these sites from being excavated. The robots were sent over to help characterize the threat.
What sort of add-ons could you have for the Roomba?
Angle: For the Roomba, there is a group that's working very seriously and looking at the idea of using the Roomba as a physical avatar. I might log into a Web page and see what the robot sees, hear what the robot hears and be able to drive the robot from my Web page.
Over time, there'll be probably more of this type of interest. The rate at which it becomes economically interesting? I've no idea. We're putting up the APIs and doing what we can to encourage people.
How much of your revenue comes from consumers, and how much comes from military/corporate contracts?
Angle: Both divisions are comparable in size, by head count or whatever method you want. Both are very, very substantial, and both have high growth as it is. I mean, the PackBot is a product that's got a price tag of about $120,000 with the arm on it, and we've got 200 of those things over in Iraq.
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Are most of the (nonconsumer) contracts with the military?
Angle: Our focus right now is trying to meet the needs of the U.S. Army and address the challenges that are happening over in the Middle East. We've been told that we've saved over a hundred lives in Iraq, and we have substantial orders to yet fulfill in getting equipment over there, and there is feedback coming about how we can add functionalities to the robots.
We are also part of a very substantial program called Future Combat Systems. It's a $22 billion program (iRobot has a $50 million contract). The idea of Future Combat System is basically to make a unit that is extremely mobile, so it can be deployed anywhere in the world in 72 hours and have all of the information gathered by any element, whether it be a soldier or a robot. All of the information would be fed into a network, so the right people can look at the relevant data. So in
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I'm thrilled about this company and what they have done in making
robotics accessable to households.
Imagine the future. This could be the Microsoft of robotics.
Cyberdyne Systems!
"human" and consumer applications robotics for years.
The market for consumer-electronics-household robotics will get
much, much bigger.
Do a Google on "Japanese Robotics".
BMR777
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The real development of robots depends on the software needed for the device to accomplish it's job. In the future there will be extremely mechanically sophisticated devices whose "software" will be the human brain guiding the object by remote control, maybe with an MRI type device "reading" the orders of the "driver."
But some mechanically sophisticated devices will be autonomous through the operation of the self-contained, somewhat AI software; an "if this, then that" program, even software which allows for unanticipated circumstances and makes appropriate "decisions" by choosing from commands in it's program(s).
I can't wait for more and better. So much of human existance could be radically improved with robotics; for menial chores, for crop harvesting, for street sweeping, for AI medical expertise through "learning" we can improve our diagnostic and treatment capability ten-fold. Through robot nanotechnology we can clean arteries, repair, organs, clean dendrites from alzheimers patients; the future is limitless!
Let's roll!
gleened from science fiction rather than science
fact.