Friday, May 29, 2009

Inside Product Design & Development

iRobot splits product market between consumers and defense

By James M. Connolly

Video Gallery

MHT Emerging Technologies Forum: Robotics

Robot sampling at RoboBusiness 2009

IRobot family tree

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In the 19 years since iRobot Corp. rolled out of MIT, co-founder and CEO Colin Angle may have learned a thing our two about product design.

For instance, designing really cool robots isn’t that hard. Designing high-quality robots that serve customer needs at the right price point, that’s hard.

Bedford-based iRobot straddles the consumer market — where it is best known for the Roomba floor cleaner — and the government and industrial markets, with applications as advanced as combat surveillance and bomb disposal. The company now brings in more than $300 million in annual revenue. Angle recently shared his thoughts on how product design has evolved at iRobot, and some future opportunities for the company.

“What we had to do from a design perspective was make the transition from a company that made really cool demos to a company that makes really cool products,” he said. One of the first steps was to “give yourself permission to not know everything” and then hire expertise to fill in those gaps.

In its early years, much of iRobot’s work was in areas such as designing toys for Hasbro Inc., and it was one of those projects — a proposal for a Jurassic Park dinosaur — that helped the company rethink its approach. The velociraptor project didn’t interest some iRobot engineers because it wasn’t original enough, according to Angle. It came about in an era when iRobot approached projects based on how exciting they were. “We had to figure out how to reinvent ourselves into a company that could make money,” he said.

The company split its focus, releasing the Roomba in 2002, and in the same time frame, building robots that could search caves for enemy fighters. “In 2002 we sent our first robot to Afganistan. Soldiers took it into caves and it saved lives,” said Angle.

Both types of robots present design challenges in terms of quality. Take the Roomba, which for about the price of a vacuum cleaner, requires “100 times” the effective lifetime: While a vacuum may be used half an hour a week, the Roomba runs an hour a day.

The seemingly split personality of the company actually presents an opportunity in the form of “a wonderful synergy that exposes the divisions to innovation.” Angle said the consumer group can “flow ideas into the military side that go against traditional monolithic solutions,” while the military work provides a proving ground for computational power and sensors. Drive systems for a consumer product may appear in an industrial or military robot, while the cleaning algorithms in the Roomba were lifted from a government contract for mine-hunting devices.

“We try to get people to rotate through different divisions, and have a lot of cross-functional sharing. We’ll get one project team to talk to us about what they are doing in front of an audience from the other division,” Angle noted.

The challenge for iRobot is to balance the desire to solve a large number of problems with the need to earn a profit. Angle sees opportunities in health care, particularly with the projected increase in elders.
“We have to change the way we care for seniors or the infrastructure is going to crumble. The good news is that what needs to happen is what the elders want anyway — that is, to age gracefully in place,” he said.

Therefore, one concept iRobot is working with is virtual visiting, the idea that a robot in the home could be proactive in tasks such as taking a blood pressure reading, and then providing a video link between patient and doctor. “House calls then become affordable, and there’s a social aspect, a human interaction,” he noted.

On the military side, Angle expects greater reliance on robots. “What our opponents have realized is that they can hide and blend in with the populace. That forces us to have more feet on the ground, trying to figure out who they are and what they are up to. We have an opportunity to bring more robots into the mainstream, and then the robot can become the target of an attack, rather than a U.S. service person,” he said.