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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
iRobot co-founder wins funds to inspect bridges, renames robotics startup
By Rodney H. Brown
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CyPhy Works Inc., the company formerly known as The Droid Works and founded by iRobot Corp. co-founder Helen Greiner, has landed a $2.4 million research award from the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.
The award runs for three years and has winners working on ways to improve the inspection and monitoring of civil infrastructure — highways, bridges and dams — using unmanned aerial vehicles.
“There are 600,000 bridge in the United States,” Greiner said, “and there is a mandate for inspection of each of them every two years.”
The NIST’s Technology Innovation Program doled out the awards, and the winners were drawn from a pool of applicants to a competition announced last March, according to Framingham’s CyPhy. For its part, CyPhy Works is teaming up with the Georgia Institute of Technology Research Corp. on the program, which calls for winners to show “practical application of advanced materials including nanomaterials, advanced alloys and composites in manufacturing.”
The CyPhy Works team is working on a new inspection system based on small, unmanned, hovering robots fitted with video cameras and other sensors, officials said. The planned hovering UAV would slowly move around bridges and similar structures and send back to engineers close-up, high-fidelity images and other data for remote inspection.
Greiner said that the grant will mean boosting up the staff at the company.
“The team is already at CyPhy works, but this will mean additional specialized engineers for this particular project,” she said.
In June, CyPhy Works landed a $100,000 National Science Foundation grant. The company is not the only local firm to partner with the Georgia Institute on UAVs, however. Waltham-based Boston Engineering Corp. landed a $70,000 Phase 1 Small Business Technology Transfer grant to develop a robotic platform to catch, service, refuel and relaunch UAVs, working with researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Greiner, who co-founded iRobot Corp. out of MIT with Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks, was named along with Angle as a Mass HighTech All-Star in 2007. She stepped down from her position as chairman of the board at iRobot in October of 2008.
As to the name change from The Droid Works, Greiner said she didn’t want people to start thinking of cell phones when her company was mentioned.
“Droid was getting pretty crowded with the Motorola phone,” she said. “As you can tell, they are putting a huge amount of effort and money behind it. We like CyPhy Works because is works on many levels. It sounds like sci-fi but it comes from Cyber and Physical.”
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