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Friday, September 12, 2008
Diaspora of ex-iRobot innovators builds new robotics cluster in region
By Brendan Lynch
IRobot family tree
DigitRobotics' uBot in action
NECN: Robots mimic tuna-like movement
If robots becoming smart enough to make other robots is a threat to humanity’s survival, what about robotics companies spawning other robotics companies?
Cheaper technology and changing demographics are making robotics startups more viable, and an entrepreneurial itch felt by several former iRobot Corp. employees is creating a diaspora of Massachusetts robot makers.
Barriers to entry for robotics companies are dropping. Technology costs less, more college graduates are entering the workforce with robotics experience, and seasoned employees are leaving established robotics companies to form their own startups. It’s a smaller-scale version of the Internet ecosystem created by alumni of Google and Amazon.com, says Cory Kidd, CEO of MIT robotics spinout Intuitive Automata Inc. “Both academia and industry are advancing the state of the art,” he said.
Three local companies have been launched or announced by entrepreneurs with robotics roots cultivated at Bedford-based consumer and military robot maker iRobot (Nasdaq: IRBT). Most recently, Rodney Brooks, co-founder and former CTO of iRobot, started work on Heartland Robotics in Cambridge, whose products Brooks said will help physical laborers the way the PC helped office workers. Roomba inventors Joseph Jones and Paul Sandin, meanwhile, launched Harvest Automation, a Groton company making robots to work at greenhouses. And ex-iRobot executives Tom Ryden and Grinnell More started North End Technologies, a startup company quietly working in Nashua, N.H., on a product that incorporates robotics into its multimedia technology.
Another example is the work of Eliot Mack and Phil Mass, engineers on the Roomba, who left iRobot in 2004 to found Cinital LLC, which makes special-effects technology for film and television studios. Cinital moved from Cambridge to Pasadena, Calif., this year and changed its name to Lightcraft Technology LLC.
Both Mack and Mass said the drastic drop in cost for technologies such as CAD and rapid prototyping, or 3-D printing, now allows robotics startups to flourish without the financial backing of an established company like iRobot. The company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on prototyping while developing the Roomba, Mack said. Using rapid prototyping allows for quicker, cheaper trial and error.
“You can iteratively design your solid parts,” Mass said.
Other factors are pulling the industry forward, including the availability of low-cost, advanced sensors, undergraduate robotics programs at schools like Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and the aging baby boomer generation, which counts Brooks as a member.
“There’s going to be a lot of us old farts around and less young people to take care of them,” Brooks said.
The ex-iRobot entrepreneurs said the company, naturally, has become “more corporate” since its IPO in 2005, and many of them preferred the atmosphere of a startup. Heartland’s Brooks, who had been with iRobot for all of its 18 years, said he works better in small teams.
“Being a corporate CTO for a big company is not my skill set,” he said.
Jones was the fourth employee to join iRobot in 1992. When he left, there were more than 300. He said a public company comes with shareholder-imposed restrictions, and a startup allows him to search far and wide for good, challenging applications. North End’s Ryden, who worked on sales and marketing on iRobot’s PackBot and SUGV military robots, said he enjoyed the excitement of a startup.
All have said iRobot was supportive of their new enterprises. Jones said he was told his new company was a good sign for the industry. Ryden credited iRobot for creating attention and opportunity for other robotics companies. And Brooks still sits on iRobot’s board and serves as a consultant.
And even though it is no longer a startup, iRobot continues to invest in innovation, Brooks said, citing the company’s ChemBot and LANdroid projects, as well as its REDOWL sniper-detecting attachment for the PackBot. The company’s R&D expenditure has risen from $11.6 million in 2005 to just over $17 million in 2006 and 2007, or roughly 7 percent of its 2007 revenue, according to iRobot’s annual report.
Still, with all the improvements, there’s still one area of robotics that’s more difficult than in other industries: Coming up with an idea in the first place — an area where Mack said his former co-worker Jones is extremely gifted.
“It’s breathtakingly difficult to make a machine pay its own rent,” Mack said.
See the interactive iRobot family tree in the upper left side of this story. Know of any other ex-iRobot founded companies? Comment below.
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