Helen Greiner, co-founder (along with Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle) of the successful robot company iRobot was
recently a guest of the Wharton School’s entrepreneurship and technology clubs. An interview with her is up on their website, and there’s a podcast as well.
In the interview, she talks about the mission of iRobot and how it might differ from other robot developers:
We are not there to do demonstrations of technology. We are not there to talk about stuff that’s going to happen 50 years from now in robots — although that’s going to be extremely exciting. We really concentrate on practical and affordable systems for today.
She also talks about how iRobot decided to open Roomba up for user-hacking, via their serial control interface, and what users have been able to do in modifying their Roombas:
One [involved] making a webcam on wheels so you can control your robot through the Internet and see what the robot sees and hear what the robot hears as you drive it around. Somebody made a robotic plant-moving system, so plants can always be in the sun. Someone was talking about making a swimming pool-skimming robot. And most recently, just this past week, some hackers did a physical instantiation of the video game Frogger. Now we don’t condone this type of activity [laughs], but it shows you just where creativity can go when you make a system open.
- [Gareth Branwyn]
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