An Interview With iRobot's Helen Greiner

A while back we posted about an interview with Colin Angle, the co-founder and CEO of iRobot. Next up is an interview with Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot. Greiner discusses founding iRobot, her interest in robots (started with R2D2), and iRobot's biggest setback (late night robot fire before a big deadline)

She also reveals she has a Roomba she's named "Arnold", and discusses the possibility of using Roomba's in educational environments by tapping into the serial interface.

Greiner also says that she hopes to branch into walking robots sometime in the future.

I think, in the future, walking robots will be extremely important, but the technology's just not quite there yet. The strength-to-weight ratio in the motors doesn't allow the output to be as effective as the track systems we already have on the market today.

iRobot is also doing research into swarm robots.

Our swarm was a research project to look at [the question]: If one robot can do a job effectively, what can a whole team of hundreds of robots do together? We built a swarm of 128 robots and we were doing core research into distributed algorithms to see how these robots can work together to get a job done more effectively.


Engadget also has more interesting tidbits about iRobot and Helen Greiner from an interview they did in Aug. of 2004.