Roomba, We've Waited for You All Our Lives
CNN has a delightful profile of Helen Greiner, Roboticist and Roomba inventor that is a must-read for young women in technology. "I think in the old days, robots had a perception of being kind of scary, and more science fiction than science fact. These robots are on a mission, and so are we: to bring robots into the mainstream. ... We can make robots do a better job than humans in some cases."
An admirer as an 11 year old girl of R2D2 in Star Wars, her latest consumer product (IRobot also has substantial military applications, but that's not "consumer") is the Roomba robotic vacuum. Imagine never having to tote around a vacuum again. The little Roomba scouts around the room, scooping up the dust and dirt, so you never have to. It's not surprising that has sold over 1 million in two years. I've watched the little critter skitter around at Frys.
It hasn't been easy to pioneer an entire field - even one so thoroughly explored in science fiction and media. With an engineering and master degree from MIT, Greiner founded iRobot with fellow MIT student Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor and CTO. According to the article "the three would start their workdays at 10:30 a.m., take late afternoon naps on office couches then work in the machine shop until 3 a.m." Typical startup hours - we did the same at Symmetric Computer Systems.
Keeping a company going that is easily ridiculed and trivialized precisely because we can't build Blade Runner replicants yet is very hard in a cynical and frankly very stupid business environment (the in-the-know people call it "nonstrategic"), especially for a woman. "Greiner spent long hours in the machine shop after iRobot's founding in 1990, struggling to create practical robots under continual threat of losing the financing that has kept the company going. Greiner had lucrative offers to go elsewhere, but stuck with iRobot."
But now the Roomba is selling well and the military just has to have more PackBots. We've all talked about robots in our home for years and enjoyed movies ranging from Star Wars to Sleeper. But it took a woman with vision, courage and a lot of hard work to really put one in our house.