iRobot

We're getting a first glimpse of that shape-shifting ChemBot we first told you about last year, and well, it looks like the love child of a beating heart and a wad of Silly Putty.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to iRobot to create the flexible military bot. The maker of the Roomba and Scooba, along with University of Chicago researchers, showed off the oozy results at the Iros conference (the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) in St. Louis this week.

DARPA envisions the … Read more

BERLIN--In the midst of America's raging debate on the future of health insurance, one man says he has a solution to out-of-control health care costs: more robots.

Of course, this is coming from Colin Angle, a roboticist and CEO of iRobot, the company that makes both robotic vacuum cleaners and bomb-defusing gadgets currently in use by the U.S. military. At IFA here on Friday, he said that robotic telepresence devices, which would act like nurses in a person's home, could reduce the $2.2 trillion, or 17 percent of the U.S. GDP, currently spent on health … Read more

Best known for its Roomba vacuums, iRobot also counts the U.S. Army as a top customer. And the latest Army deal is the company's single biggest.

iRobot said Tuesday it has received an order from the U.S. Army for $35.3 million for robots equipped to help soldiers safely evaluate dangerous conditions.

The order, made by the U.S. Army TACOM Contracting Center in Warren, Mich., calls for 486 iRobot PackBot 510 with FasTac Kit robots by March 31, 2010. This single order is part of an overall larger contract worth $286 million, of which $125 million … Read more

To combat a robot invasion in the movies, the hero may need some sort of high-powered superweapon. To slow one down in real life, a heaping helping of recession should do the trick.

NextGen Research on Tuesday eased back the throttle on hopes for a surge in the number of robots arriving on the home front in the near future. In its new "Personal Robotics 2009" report, the research company forecasts that the global market for personal robots will be worth more than $5 billion in 2015, up from just over $1 billion seen for this year.

Put … Read more

Corrections were made to this interview. See below for details.

The PackBot robot has made a name for itself in dangerous places like Iraq, but the future may belong to both its bigger and smaller siblings.

U.S. military forces have long made use of the PackBot to discover and disarm roadside bombs, keeping flesh-and-blood soldiers out of harm's way. Now its maker, iRobot, is looking to make inroads with two variations on the design.

The SUGV (short for small unmanned ground vehicle) may be one of the technologies that emerges in good shape from the Army's massively … Read more

Many CNET readers have been complaining that they're not seeing the major deals they thought the economy would encourage in electronics.

I agree. I haven't seen them yet, either. But here's one: iRobot is having a one-day sale on Friday until midnight on its Roomba 416 for $200, with a free upgrade kit for handling pet hair.

The Roomba 416 comes with two beacons for controlling where the Roomba roams, and it can clean up to two rooms before needing to be recharged, according to iRobot. It does not offer the onboard scheduling feature of the higher-end … Read more

iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner has resigned from her position as chairman of iRobot, effective October 24, the company announced Wednesday evening.

Chief Executive Colin Angle, also a co-founder, was voted unanimously by iRobot's board to take Greiner's place. Angle will also remain the company's CEO, according to a company statement.

iRobot was not immediately available for comment.

The company is now down two major company leaders. Greiner's sudden departure closely follows a September announcement that iRobot co-founder and famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology roboticist Rodney Brooks was leaving his position as iRobot's chief technology officer. … Read more

iRobot is offering deep discounts on its home products if you buy directly from its Web site.

We're wondering why, and it comes down to two possibilities, really.

One, they have newer, brighter, shinier models in the pipeline and need to unload old stock. Or, two, they're simply trying to get a head start on the holiday-season discounts expected from retailers, given the state of the economy.

Most recently, iRobot sent an e-mail letting people know it's offering $50 off its Scooba 380 model if you buy it before October 24. It normally sells for $450. That … Read more

iRobot plans to acquire an underwater robotics company for $10 million, the company announced Monday.

The announcement comes one week after iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks said he will step down as iRobot's chief technology officer to pursue a new venture. While Brooks will remain on iRobot's board, his move has left some people questioning what's next for the growing robotics company.

Here's one answer the company seems keen to make known.

"We believe that the underwater market is the next frontier for robots. This acquisition positions us for leadership in robot solutions on both the land and sea," Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman of iRobot, said in a statement.

iRobot predicts that the purchase of Nekton Research will garner it up to $8 million in product and contract revenue for 2009. The deal also expands iRobot's client list to include several agencies in the U.S. Navy.

Nekton's products, according to iRobot, will dovetail with the Seaglider, an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) iRobot purchased the commercial rights to develop from the University of Washington in June.

Nekton Research, based in Durham, N.C., was founded by a group of faculty from Duke University. It makes about five types of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) and related robotics technology.

The Ranger is for search and underwater surveying with a faster version called the Nekton High Speed UUV. Nekton has several different fin-equipped UUVs when specific maneuverability is an issue, as with its Transphibian robot for clearing underwater landmines.

The BioBay is the sea equivalent of a chemical detection robot and can also take water samples. It's currently being used by the EPA in several areas where contaminated water is a concern, according to Nekton Research. Nekton Research is also developing a team of tiny swarming underwater robots called MicroHunters. They can be sent en masse for scoping out large areas of water.… Read more