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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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MAY 6, 2004
Robots: Today, Roomba. Tomorrow... iRobot CEO Colin Angle says the robotic vacuum cleaner "is insanely cool because it retails for $200" -- and more products like it are on the way At just 36, Colin Angle is a little young to be considered a patriarch, especially to a family with dozens of members. Yet in the 14 years that he has been CEO of iRobot, Angle's Burlington (Mass.) company has regularly expanded that family, which now includes a small army of robots. To date, the majority of iRobot's progeny have been limited-run designs, built for highly specialized uses. Consider its one-off Pyramid Rover, just 14 inches wide, which was custom-designed to move on tracks down a long, narrow shaft to help explore Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza. iRobot builds others in larger numbers for military and industrial customers. More than 50 of iRobot's Packbots are being used in Afghanistan and Iraq to help the military remotely defuse bombs and investigate high-risk situations. Yet the most widely used of Angle's growing brood -- and thus, the most numerous -- may turn out to be the Roomba. Even though it may have more in common with a remote-controlled toy than with a military-grade Packbot, this robotic vacuum in the shape of an oversize hockey puck became a surprise hit last year, when it introduced millions of Americans to household robots for the first time. Indeed, over Christmas, the privately held company struggled to keep up with demand for the hundred-thousand plus machines that sold for around $200 apiece. RIPPLE EFFECT. That by itself was a welcome windfall. But for both iRobot and the broader robot industry, the Roomba's success may mark the beginning something much bigger: a new age of robots, in which smart, autonomous machines will ceased to be such specialized, costly devices that only big-budget customers can afford. It may even be a signal that the era of affordable, consumer-grade, mass-produced, robot workers has begun. The ripples from this shift are already apparent within iRobot, in ways that are as much about business as robotics. The company has become faster-reacting and more flexible, thanks to what it has learned by mass-producing Roombas in partnership with a contract manufacturer in China. Angle recently talked to Adam Aston, BusinessWeek's Industries editor, about what iRobot has learned from the Roomba and what the future holds for its descendants. Here a edited excerpts of their conversation: Q: How did you find your way into robotics? A: I grew up in Upstate New York, in Niskayuna, where GE (GE ) has its corporate R&D labs and builds large steam turbines. It's an interesting place -- all the GE engineers lived there, so the school system is great. Even in high school, I was always more interested in hands-on building than in theory. So, I went to MIT, where my undergraduate degree was in engineering. In 1988, I got involved with Rodney Brooks' artificial intelligence labs. I built a robot featuring Rod's AI paradigm called Genghis. It ended up being a tremendous demo for MIT's AI lab. Q: How did that work become a business? A: I stayed at MIT for my master's. After that, Rodney Brooks wanted to start a company, so I popped out of the grad program and went to work at what was then called ISRobotics [which after a series of name changes became iRobot]. Growing up, I had always been a wilderness expedition leader, and folks had always told me I would run a business, but I didn't believe them. It felt right, felt natural. After two or three weeks on job, I took over as CEO, at the age 22. Fourteen years later, here I am, with what I do still changing constantly. Q: Your background prepared you to build specialized robots. But how did it prep you to run a manufacturing business? A: As the Roomba began to take off -- and sales were way beyond our forecasts -- I remember making speeches to our guys, saying there's no reason why we should be good at this. We needed to take the time to learn how to do manufacturing well. We needed to find people who knew the gritty issue of quality. We knew we built robotic prototypes better than anyone in the world, but this was a different game. We had to hire everyone from quality-control engineers to customer service specialists. There has been a lot of transformation. Engineers get a kick out of that. That's one of their driving satisfactions. We hired probably around 50 people, and that's with aggressive outsourcing. If you add all those new people together, it's probably 700 additional heads working to support the Roomba. Q: How did you iron out the bugs in the Roomba's early version? A: In the past, it was all about innovation here. We learned to make quality a huge priority. When we launched Roomba, we would ship someone out to Hong Kong to work with our contract manufacturer, thinking they could come back in three months, after the holiday rush. But they just wouldn't come back -- there was always more to do. So we opened a Hong Kong office. We hired two locals, including one mainlander who spends time working the line, solving issues, making sure quality stays high. These machines are complicated -- more like cars than toys -- and an early version had a glitch. We fixed a power problem by sending out a hundred thousand dongles that fixed a fault in the battery-recharging system. There's a cost to making a mistake, but we've tightened our relationship substantially with our manufacturer as a result.
BW MALL
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