Robots have already found limited work in healthcare by assisting surgeons with operations and physical therapists with rehabilitating patients, among other jobs. So why can’t robots keep an eye on seniors and give them their medications?

Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) made headlines last month with the announcement of its recently created healthcare division, which is being headed by veteran software entrepreneur Tod Loofbourrow. The company’s ambitious plan is to develop a robot to help seniors live independently in their homes—something that no other company has accomplished. To learn more, I headed over to the firm’s headquarters last week.

The 7-year-old in me hoped to show up at iRobot and find the “medical droid” from Star Wars. But I knew not to expect to see such a humanoid robot, so I wasn’t disappointed when Loofbourrow told me that there were no healthcare robots to show me. Yet at one point during our interview, he flipped open his laptop and showed me a conceptual video of one of the company’s robots rolling over to an elderly person’s bedside and placing a bottle of pills on a side table. He said the video was intended to illustrate the company’s long-term vision for a healthcare robot, but the robot depicted was not a prototype of what the firm plans to market initially.

The senior citizen in the video, however, represented the first demographic iRobot aims to serve with a healthcare robot. There could be tremendous value in a robot that could help seniors live at home and avoid nursing homes, Loofbourrow explained, noting that the average nursing home in Massachusetts costs about $10,000 a month. Supporting patient care in the home may also help seniors avoid costly hospitalizations, which are a major factor in the whopping $2.4 trillion annual healthcare bill in the U.S. But the U.S. healthcare system hasn’t fully embraced using telemedicine—let alone robots—to enable patients to receive care in their homes.

Nevertheless, the leadership of iRobot decided that the time is right to launch a healthcare division, Loofbourrow said. The company has been interested in how its robots could be used to help patients for more than a decade. Indeed, company chairman and CEO Colin Angle told me back in 2006 that a robot for home healthcare was about three years from the market. And two years ago I spotted a concept robot the company developed called “CiCi” at a medical technology conference; an MIT robotics engineer told me for this Mass High Tech story that the stationary robot had two-way audio and remote-monitoring capabilities. Healthcare could eventually become a major business for iRobot, which already has succeeded in introducing robots like the Roomba for the household market and the PackBot for the military market.

“The company sees an opportunity to really transform a market,” Loofbourrow said. “So I’m here to build a very big business and a third leg of the stool for iRobot.”

Loofbourrow’s fascination with robotics dates back at least as far as his teenage years. As the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reported in his blog post last month, Loofbourrow was16 years old when he wrote a book called “How to Build a Computer-Controlled Robot” in the late-1970s. He explained that when he was a child, his father was an engineer at Bell Labs and their basement was filled with circuit boards and other parts for building robots. The robot he built around a single-board microprocessor featured voice recognition and ultrasonic navigation, he said.

The Harvard University graduate was most recently founder and CEO of Waltham, MA-based Authoria, a provider of talent management software that Loofbourrow grew into a $40 million annual business with more than 300 employees in the U.S., Europe, and India. He sold the company in 2008 to White Plains, NY-based Bedford Funding for …Next Page »

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A number of New England’s life sciences companies had good news to report this week.

—Cambridge, MA-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) reported results from clinical trials that indicate its experimental hepatitis C drug, telaprevir, could work well for patients who haven’t responded fully to standard treatments, and could be as effective taken twice a day as it is taken three times a day. Luke explains what the news means for Vertex’s efforts to capture a share of the potentially huge market for hepatitis treatments.

—Medical device maker Interlace Medical of Framingham, MA, won FDA clearance to market its minimally invasive device for removing uterine fibroids and polyps.

—Burlington, MA-based CorNova raised $2.5 million of a proposed $6 million in equity financing, according to regulatory filings. CorNova is developing coronary stents with platinum surfaces.

—Anti-inflammatory drug developer Virdante Pharmaceuticals completed a second closing of its Series A financing round, bringing the total collected so far to $30 million. Thomas, McNerney & Partners led the deal, which was joined by Osage Partners, Biogen Idec New Ventures, Clarus Ventures, MedImmune Ventures, and Venrock Associates.

—Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) launched a new healthcare unit. Under the direction of technology veteran Tod Loofbourrow, the unit will focus on developing robots to help seniors live independently.

—Pharma giant Novartis declined an option to continue development of a hepatitis C drug from Cambridge-based Idenix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: IDIX). Idenix, whose stock dropped on the news, will seek another partner to back development of the drug, IDX184.

—RNA-interference drug developer Cequent raised $3.35 million in the first tranche of a venture round that could be worth as much as $15 million. The Cambridge-based startup is engineering E. coli bacteria to deliver RNAi molecules designed to combat a certain type of polyp in the colon.

—Pulmatrix raised $30.2 million in a Series B venture round led by Arch Venture Partners and Novartis Bioventures Fund and joined by Polaris Venture Partners and 5AM Ventures. The Lexington, MA-based startup is using technology from MIT and Harvard to prevent flu viruses and other pathogens from invading lung tissue.

—Cancer diagnostics developer On-Q-ity of Waltham, MA, reportedly raised $21 million in a Series A round of venture capital from Mohr Davidow, Bessemer Venture Partners, Physic Ventures and Northgate Capital. The firm was formed through the merger of CELLective Diagnostics and The DNA Repair Company, both Mohr Davidow Ventures portfolio companies.

—Ironwood Pharmaceuticals of Cambridge and its partner, New York-based Forest Laboratories (NYSE: FRX), said that Ironwood’s lead drug candidate, linaclotide, fared well in two pivotal clinical trials. The drug is designed to relieve chronic constipation; Luke has all (and I mean all) the details.

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IRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT), the Bedford, MA-based maker of robots such as the Roomba for vacuuming and the PackBot for the military, revealed today that it has created a healthcare unit to focus on developing robots that help seniors live independently in their homes. Technology veteran Tod Loofbourrow is heading the new healthcare unit as its president and will report directly to iRobot CEO Colin Angle, according to the company. Angle is expected to discuss the company’s healthcare strategy today at the TEDMED conference in San Diego.

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Sometimes a robot just needs a little help from its friends. And now a pair of former iRobot engineers who lost their jobs in last year’s downsizing at the Bedford, MA, company have struck out on their own to help iRobot’s popular Roomba floor cleaning robots do their jobs better.

Launched in January, Robot Add-Ons introduced its first Roomba accessory just four months ago and already has 10 products in its catalog, from protective bumpers to hypoallergenic filters. Created by Jim Lynch, an electrical engineer who invented iRobot’s Looj gutter-cleaning robot, and Barry Stout, a software engineer who contributed to the Roomba’s internal programming, the Georgetown, MA, startup has a mission to help consumers get more out of their investment in a home robot.

Roombas are “really good at accomplishing one task, but there are a whole bunch of other tasks they can do really well if given the right accessories,” says Lynch.

Robot Add-Ons is an entirely bootstrapped, self-funded operation—Lynch and Stout are handing everything, right down to filming product demonstration videos. All of the company’s products are available from its website and from other niche e-retailing sites for robot fans, and may eventually be available from the same stores that sell Roombas, such as Best Buy and Bed, Bath & Beyond. “The general marketing plan is to be wherever iRobot is,” says Stout. But even without a bricks-and-mortar outlet, sales are “doubling weekly,” he says.

Of course, iRobot itself (NASDAQ: IRBT) sells a line of Roomba accessories, including replacement brushes, filters, and batteries. So Robot Add-Ons is focusing on things iRobot doesn’t make—but maybe ought to.

“We’re trying to solve the everyday problems that people have with Roomba that prevent it from having a successful cleaning mission,” explains Lynch. “Like getting wedged under some furniture. If you walk in and there it is, stuck under the couch, then it hasn’t been very successful. We’re trying to help with the whole experience of owning a robot. That’s certainly a need I think we can fill.”

Robot Add-Ons’ product line includes a bumper extender that helps prevent the furniture-wedging problem; it’s a little horn, called the “Unicorn,” that makes the Roomba’s touch-sensitive bumper about an inch taller. There’s also a bumper pad that keeps the Roomba from scuffing furniture; three different types of cleaning pads that replace the Roomba’s main brush, making the vacuum more effective on hard floors; and a HEPA filter that traps smaller particles than those the Roomba’s own filter can catch.

Perhaps the most ingenious product is a …Next Page »

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Boston is home to a huge cluster of hot game companies, from Harmonix to Turbine to 38 Studios. But you might be surprised to learn just how deep the region’s gaming history goes. If Xconomy had been around a century ago, we probably would have been writing about Parker Brothers, which got its start in Salem, MA, in 1883 and went on to create Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and Trivial Pursuit, to name just a few of the company’s blockbuster board games.

As Parker Brothers’ star gradually dimmed—it was absorbed by General Mills in 1963, then Tonka in 1987, then Hasbro in 1991—Boston’s prominence in the game and toy business waned as well. But today the Parker Brothers gaming legacy is re-emerging—and fusing with another local industry, robotics. The link? Tom Dusenberry, a lifelong game industry insider who got his start working on the Parker Brothers loading dock and eventually rose to become the founder and CEO of Hasbro Interactive, the video game subsidiary of toy giant Hasbro (NYSE: HAS). This week the multinational startup Robonica, where Dusenberry is now president, will launch its first product: Robini-i, a novel wheeled robot packed with sensors, radios, and a fully programmable onboard brain.

Roboni-i is arguably the biggest thing to hit the robot-toy business since the uber-popular Lego Mindstorms. And the new robot is emerging just a few miles from Salem, in Beverly, MA, where Robonica is headquartered. But there’s also a South African side to the story: Robonica CEO Johan Poolman, an electrical engineer by training, is the founder of a series of technology companies in the Johannesburg area, and works from the company’s R&D and manufacturing facilities in Centurion, a suburb of Pretoria. The company has 45 employees in Centurion, and obtained 100 percent of its financing from a pair of technology investment funds run by the South African government, Dusenberry says.

Sometimes, all a smart startup needs to succeed is a lucky break, and Robonica has caught a huge one. Hammacher Schlemmer, the specialty gift merchandiser, decided to feature the Roboni-i on the cover of its Holiday 2009 catalog, which is being mailed out to millions of consumers starting today. (”How cool is that?” Dusenberry cracks.) The robots are also available starting today from Robonica’s website, and will be stocked by FAO Schwarz, the Fry’s Home Electronics chain on the West Coast, and some Toys R Us stores, as well as Amazon and other e-retailers.

Dusenberry says the primary target audience for the Roboni-i is 13- to 17-year-old boys, for whom the remote-controlled devices will provide, in his words, “a killer interactive entertainment experience.” But after watching a demonstration at last week’s MassTLC Tech Tuesday event at Microsoft’s NERD Center in Cambridge—and, I admit, after taking the Roboni-i for a spin myself—I think it’s safe to say that the nimble little machines will appeal to gadget lovers of all ages.

Roboni-i comes pre-programmed with six action games that, in the words of a company announcement, challenge players to “beat the odds, race against time, manage resources, neutralize threats, execute special effects and collect bonus points to improve score.” Using the remote control, players can maneuver the robots around pylons, saucers, balls, and other accessories; the units also have sensors that allow them to navigate autonomously or …Next Page »

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There were good, bad, and ugly deals in New England’s technology and life sciences sectors this past week. Yet there are more highlights and lowlights. You can judge under which of those three categories (good, bad, ugly) the following deals fall:

—Wade did some digging in the SEC database last Friday to report that Cambridge, MA-based industrial robotics firm Heartland Robotics, founded by MIT computer science guru and iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) cofounder Rod Brooks, raised $7 million in equity capital. Our intrepid senior correspondent also confirmed that Bezos Expeditions, which manages the personal investments of Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, took part in the round.

—Cambridge-based Gloucester Pharmaceuticals reeled in $29 million in a Series D round of venture capital financing from previous backers and new investor Novo A/S, Luke reported. The money comes as the cancer drug developer prepares to make its case for approval of its first drug, romidepsin—which has been developed to treat a rare form of blood cancer called cutaneous T-cell lymphoma—to an FDA advisory committee at a meeting slated for next week.

—Cambridge blood replacement maker Biopure took another step into the grave last week, completing a bankruptcy auction that saw its business assets go to OPK Biotech for $4 million. We also learned from online business journal MassDevice that the owner of OPK is a Russian …Next Page »

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At the Nantucket Conference, an invitation-only gathering of New England-area CEOs, entrepreneurs, venture partners, and select others, first-time attendees get a single blue dot on their nametags. Alumni get another dot for every year they’ve attended, and veterans of five or more conferences get a gold starfish pin.

About a third of the participants at the tenth annual conference, held April 30 to May 2 on Nantucket Island, MA, had one blue dot, including myself (I was one of a handful of journalists invited by the conference organizer, Shayne Gilbert of Future Forward Events). But strikingly—despite the obsession among attendees with the economy’s drastic downturn and its effects on entrepreneurship—several of the starfish people said afterward that it was the best, most energetic edition of the conference they’d been to. It seems that the crisis has inflamed the classic innovator’s itch to get on with business—and to invent new ones.

In past years, the proceedings of the Nantucket Conference were off the record to journalists unless a source explicitly agreed to be quoted. This year, the organizers reversed the policy, so everything was on the record, unless a speaker indicated otherwise—which only happened once the entire weekend, to my knowledge. That meant attendees were free to indulge their social media passions, blogging and tweeting freely (you can see the whole conference Twitter stream here).

It also means I’m able to bring you a few of the main themes from the conference. Though the program included panels on topics as diverse as getting venture funding, robotics, gaming, energy, and the roots of the economic crisis, a few ideas seemed to frame the mood of the conference (and perhaps of the entrepreneurial set in general these days), a mindset I’d call pragmatic optimism. Some of the main elements:

Fundraising is getting harder—especially for new companies, but even for established ones. Michael Greeley, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, pointed to estimates that only 600 new startups will win venture funding nationwide this year, down from 1,171 in 2008. VC firms have become exceedingly cautious, keeping $5 in reserve for every $1 they invest, rather than the more traditional 2-to-1 ratio, Greeley said. Jana Eggers, CEO of Leipzig, Germany-based Spreadshirt, a T-shirt customization company whose North American headquarters are in Boston, said that even though her company is cash-flow-positive, it had a very difficult time raising its most recent round of growth capital. The terms offered by potential funders were “shocking” and were “clearly based on the economy, not on our fundamentals,” Eggers said.

In areas such as robotics where New England has clear strengths, venture capital is largely absent, pointed out MIT roboticist Rod Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot who now leads stealth-mode startup Heartland Robotics. In the energy and cleantech space, according to General Catalyst’s Hemant Tenaja, money from hedge funds and strategic investors has largely dried up, and the spigots will stay off until Congress and the Obama Administration work out energy and climate bills. And heaven help the startups that need cash quick: Each of Boston-Power’s three funding rounds took a year to negotiate, according to CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud. “The best time to raise capital is when you don’t need it,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder of Vertica Systems, former CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a veteran of Bowstreet (acquired by IBM).

On the other hand, companies need less money—and should probably be lowering their sights anyway. John Landry, a software industry veteran who is managing director at Wayland, MA-based Lead Dog Ventures, used his pulpit as moderator of a panel on “Getting and Staying Funded” to argue that infotech startups “don’t really need a lot of money” these days thanks to technologies like …Next Page »

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Imagine a soldier is wounded in the middle of a violent firefight in the streets of Mosul, Iraq. With bullets whizzing in every direction, it’s almost guaranteed that a medic would be shot in a rescue attempt. Enter the BEAR robot, which rolls up to the wounded soldier, scoops her up in its arms, and spirits her away to safety. This scenario, still hypothetical at this point, is the initial aim of the BEAR (Battlefield Extraction-Assist Robot).

Vecna Technologies, which developed the BEAR in Cambridge, MA, for the U.S. Army, tells Xconomy that the rescue robot is expected to be put through its paces for the first time at Fort Benning, GA, as early as mid-April, representing a major milestone in its development. “We’re a bunch of nerds mostly from MIT, Stanford, and other nerdy schools,” says Andrew Allen, an engineer who is managing the project at Vecna. “We need the feedback from the field to know what are the technical challenges, so that the soldiers in the field can be helped by this system.”

Video footage of similar field tests in 2008 made a YouTube sensation of Waltham, MA-based Boston Dynamics’ BigDog, a stunningly agile quadruped robot. (A YouTube clip of the robotic canine has been viewed more than 8 million times and counting.) The BEAR will undergo some of the same tests as the BigDog, including a climbing exercise and a swift kick by a soldier intended to gauge its ruggedness and stability, says Allen.

Though designed for some of the same missions as BigDog, the BEAR is a humanoid robot that stands 6.5 feet tall on two legs. The legs bend at the hip and knee joints and both the thigh and calf segments have treads, enabling the robot to kneel and drive like a tank (it can’t yet walk upright). On its treads, the robot can carry up to 500 pounds in its hydraulic-powered arms, a level of strength that exceeds other robots in development for the military, Allen says. The BEAR is designed to be controlled remotely by a single person and can also do things autonomously like pick up a box and move it to a specific location.

“The ways that a BEAR can be used are nearly endless—and our team of engineers from top universities continually push these limits,” Deborah Theobald, CEO of Vecna, said in an e-mail. “Needless to say, we’re very excited about the BEAR project, and all of the robots that the team has invented.”

The BEAR is not expected to be ready for actual military use until 2015, and the robot is still very much a work in progress. For instance, Allen says, Vecna has designed a stabilization system that might allow future models of the robot to take …Next Page »

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Massachusetts’ growing robotics cluster just got bigger. For the second time in less than six months, an iRobot co-founder has launched a robotics startup. Helen Greiner told me in an e-mail yesterday that she has formed a stealth company called The Droid Works. “Our first project is in the UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] space, and a team of people from around the country are working on this project today,” her short note said.

Beyond that, the note contained little, and Greiner (our newest Xconomist) didn’t say much more when I reached her on her cell phone, declining to discuss how the company was funded, the number of people involved, or anything else of substance. “I am not ready to describe the types of UAVs, missions, or what the company will take on in the future yet,” her note said. The one thing she clarified on the phone was that she didn’t mean to imply—as I had wondered about from her note—that The Droid Works is a virtual company. Rather, all she meant by saying people are working from around the country, she says, is that not everyone working on the first project is based in the Boston area.

A shell website can be found here. If I had to guess from its name, The Droid Works might be set up to tackle different types of projects in robotics, rather than being focused solely on UAVs. I also think the website looks like it has the same designer as fellow iRobot co-founder Rod Brooks’s Heartland Robotics, so I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection between Brooks’s firm and Greiner’s, or if they might be sharing space in Cambridge’s Central Square, where Heartland is based.

Greiner’s venture comes a little more than five months after Brooks (who’s also an Xconomist) left iRobot, where he was CTO, to found Heartland, which is focused on creating workplace robots.

Greiner herself stepped down as chairman of iRobot’s board and as a full-time employee about seven weeks later, in late October. Like Brooks, she remains on the iRobot board.

When I reached her the day her iRobot departure was announced, Greiner related how she had gotten hooked on robotics when she was 11, and that she had no intention of leaving the field. However, she said she was going to take some time to reflect and continue her public service work—she serves on the boards of MIT and the Boston Museum of Science, and as chair of the national Robotic Technology Consortium, among other roles—before making any decisions about her career. “I’m going to keep doing all of those things while I take a look around at what I want to do next,” she told me.

I even asked her at the time if she was joining Brooks at Heartland or had her eye on some other company. “I honestly don’t have any entity that I’m thinking about right now. I really want to be able to take a look around, and I would never feel comfortable doing that as chairman of iRobot,” Greiner said.

Now it appears she has found her comfort zone.

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Here at 10 Rogers Street we’re bending considerable energy toward final preparations for the Battle of the Tech Bands 2, a week from today (January 22) at the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub in Central Square, Cambridge. Reserve tickets now for $20 apiece and you’ll be benefiting the two local non-profits, Science Club for Girls and the Community Music Center of Boston, to whom we’re donating half of the ticket proceeds. (More about these fine organizations below.)

Attending the show also gives you a chance to win one of six great door prizes being provided by area technology firms:

• Two Roomba 560 robot vacuum cleaners, donated by iRobot of Bedford, MA

• Two Zune music players, donated by Microsoft, which has a major R&D facility in Cambridge, MA

• Two Rock Band bundles, donated by Harmonix Music Systems of Cambridge.

Be sure to bring your business cards to the event, as we’ll choose door prize winners by fishing cards out of a bucket. (For the card-free among you, never fear—we’ll have blanks available as well.)

This year we’re also making tickets available in blocks of 25 for organizations who’d like to make the Battle into a company outing, or for individuals who are—or want to become—really popular. If you or your company buys a block of tickets, we’ll acknowledge you as an Event Supporter. Local firms American Well, EnerNOC, Ideo, and Nano-C have already taken that plunge (thanks guys!)–to follow suit, you can purchase your block of tickets at the Battle of the Tech Bands 2 registration site here. (Contact Xconomy business manager Richard Freierman at richard@xconomy.com if you have any questions or difficulties.)

And while you’re gearing up to shake your booty and cheer on your favorite band, rest assured that you’ll also be helping a good cause—or actually two good causes.

Science Club for Girls, based in Cambridge, was founded in 1994 to encourage K-12 girls to consider careers in science and technology. Through free after-school science clubs for K-7 girls and a “junior assistant” mentorship program for girls in 7th through 12th grade, the group provides hands-on experience with science concepts and skills and exposure to successful women role models from science and engineering. Currently, the organization is running clubs in Boston, Cambridge, Framingham, Lawrence, and Newton.

The Community Music Center of Boston, now in its 99th year, is a music school for students of all backgrounds, ages, and abilities, based at the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End. The product of a 1968 merger between two historic settlement schools for immigrant children, CMCB serves more than 5,000 students weekly, offering low-cost individual and ensemble instruction in voice, performance, music theory, and 23 different musical instruments—including, for all you rock fans, percussion and electric guitar.

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Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), which makes small robots for home and military applications, announced today that it has secured six grants totaling $4.4 million under the Pentagon’s Small Business Innovative Research program. The grants, which are aimed at making iRobot’s Packbot and small unmanned ground vehicle (SUGV) robots easier to use and at developing ways to coordinate ground robots and unmanned aerial vehicles, are coming from the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, the U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Army Research Office.

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Who couldn’t use a robot or two to help with household chores? To make finding that robo-helper easier (and to boost holiday sales) Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced last week it was opening a kiosk in the Burlington Mall that will show off its Roomba robot vacuum cleaners and other bots for gutter cleaning, floor washing. The kiosk opened on Saturday and will close in mid-January.

A kiosk opening isn’t something we normally cover in Xconomy. But especially since the head of iRobot’s home robots division left last May–in what seemed to signal a shake up in the company’s consumer business—I wanted to know more about what the mall outpost portends for the future of home robots, both at iRobot and more broadly. To that end, I spoke with iRobot CEO Colin Angle, who sketched a vision of robots transforming household drudgery in much the same way (although he didn’t draw the exact parallel) that electric appliances revolutionized things like dishwashing and laundry a few generations ago.

“As we roll the clock forward you’re going to see more and more home robots…and the concept of a robot store is going to be something that every mall is going to want to have,” Angle says. IRobot’s kiosk, he says, is “one of the first practical robot stores ever to be in existence that wasn’t focused on meeting the needs of the hobbyist. I think it is an important milestone in our industry.”

In Angle’s world, there are two types of people: “those who own Roombas and believe, and those who don’t own Roombas.” On the home side of the business (the company also has a big military division), iRobot’s challenge has always been reaching that second group, and convincing people that “practical robots are here, and they can be saving you time and giving you more control over your home.”

Enter the kiosk. As Angle puts it, “nothing can convert a skeptic into a believer like a live demonstration.” The company has been thinking about a retail presence for quite a while, he says, “and felt like we now have a broad enough array of products that we could at least justify a kiosk.” Staffers will experiment with direct sales of a few items, but will mainly demonstrate products and help customers order online as the company tests its messaging, training, and so forth. And while the kiosk will shut down in mid-January, says Angle, “Certainly if it goes well then you have not seen the last of kiosks for iRobot.”

But what about the bigger picture? IRobot recently released positive third-quarter numbers that showed sales up 45 percent over the same period last year, with the home division driving the revenue increase. But margins can be tight in consumer products, and it’s not clear how much of the third quarter’s small ($3.9 million) profits, if any, came from the home division. In any case, the division seems to be in the midst of an overhaul. In May, the company announced the departure of home division president Sandra Lawrence. Since then, the home business has been led by interim general manager Jon Elordi, who previously ran the firm’s international business. IRobot also hired an operations chief from Gillette to improve supply chain efficiency and gross margins. But the company is still running in the red for the year, and Angle acknowledges the economy isn’t helping the overall picture. “Right now we’re in a period of great uncertainty in the economy, and it’s impacting consumer-facing businesses in other industries throughout the country and throughout the world. So there’s a lot of wait and see,” he says.

Despite my best efforts, I don’t feel like I got a detailed picture from Angle of what is going on right now in the consumer division. But the iRobot CEO seemed generally positive about the longer-term future—and especially the growing consumer presence of robots. “The Roomba has shown that there is a very interesting and exciting market for robots that can deliver the goods,” he says. “This is here to stay.”

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Helen Greiner just called me. She didn’t go into any particulars of how or why she came to step down as iRobot’s chairman today, but she did sound upbeat about the next phase of her life—and told me some history about she got hooked on robotics at age 11 and wasn’t about to leave the field. “I don’t think I can tell you that much, because my plan is to take some time to think about it. I believe that when you do something you do it 200 percent, and that’s what I’ve been doing with iRobot,” she says. I took that to mean she was going to consider carefully what would light her fire to the same degree it has been lit at iRobot, which she helped found in 1990.

“I know what I’m going to keep doing, which is being on the board of iRobot,” she says, also noting that she plans to keep working with the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council’s Robotics Cluster and serve as the first president of the Robotic Technology Consortium, a national organization with about 90 robot companies under its auspices. She also just joined the MIT Board, and serves on the board of Boston’s Museum of Science. “I’m going to keep doing all those of those things while I take a look around at what I want to do next,” she says.

Over the Christmas holidays, she’s also going to go kite-boarding. But, at age 40, Greiner isn’t going to kick back and take it easy, she says. And when she goes back to work, you can bet it will have something to do with robotics. “I am a robot person and I’ve been a robot person all my life, since I was 11.”

Greiner was born in London (she is a true Cockney, she says), but grew up on Long Island and later in Boston—and it is the mix of those three accents that is a big reason why people are always struggling to guess where she is from. She says she went to see Star Wars when she was 11 and living on Long Island. “I was enthralled with R2D2, and I’ve wanted to build robots ever since. That’s why I went to MIT. Once robots grab you, you’re kind of hooked.”

So, I wondered, was she about to join iRobot co-founder and her former mentor at MIT Rod Brooks at his new company, Heartland Robotics? She denied having plans to join any other venture. “I honestly don’t have any entity that I’m thinking about right now. I really want to be able to take a look around, and I would never feel comfortable doing that as chairman of iRobot,” she says.

As I noted, Greiner didn’t go into detail about why she’s stepping down as chairman, and it’s hard not to speculate that it was at least partially involuntary—but at the same time, it’s easy to imagine that she has simply had enough of the grind and has decided to move on. Either way, it’s clear to me that she will still give her board service that same 200 percent she always gives. “I think I can continue to add a lot of value,” she says.

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Updated Oct. 22, 5 pm with comment from company: IRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, who has been instrumental in guiding the company since its inception in 1990 and who has served as a leading voice on robotics innovation worldwide, has resigned as chairman of the company’s board and will be replaced by her fellow co-founder and CEO Colin Angle, the company announced this afternoon.

“Helen will continue to serve on iRobot’s board of directors as a non-employee director while pursuing other interests and opportunities within the robot industry,” the company said in a statement.

For her part, Greiner was quoted in the short press release as saying: “I will remain close to the company through my work on the board,” said Greiner. “I am excited about where the robot industry is going and how I can help shape the future through individual endeavors, work with the Robotics Technology Consortium, Massachusetts Robotics Cluster and the various boards on which I serve.”

We are trying to reach Greiner for direct comment and will update this story as more is learned.

Update 2: I just spoke with Nancy Dussault-Smith, Vice President, Marketing Communications, for iRobot. She was vague on the details, and Greiner herself was not made available for the call–so read into that what you will. However, she stressed that Greiner, who took over as chairman in 2004, and the company both agreed on the move.

She also stressed that Greiner will not only remain a director of the company, but that she will continue to “be a passionate advocate of the industry…Helen’s in a good place. She’s always been someone who’s been entrepreneurial. She’s a robot person through and through, and she’s going to stay in the robot business.”

Dussault-Smith did confirm, however, that as chairman Greiner was a full-time employee of the firm who came into the office daily. This is no longer the case.

Update 2: It’s no secret that iRobot has encountered some bumps in the road and made some key personnel changes recently, even as it has made several acquisitions, the most recent of which was its $10 million purchase of unmanned underwater vehicle firm Nekton Research last month: Greiner told me the story of the acquisition here. In May, the company announced the departure of Sandra B. Lawrence, head of its Home Robots Division. In September, as we reported in detail, co-founder and CTO Rod Brooks left to start his own company, Heartland Robotics, though, like Greiner, he remains a director.

And despite winning a series of military contracts, the company has been facing ongoing financial losses. Its third quarter earnings, which were also reported today, showed strong improvement. The firm announced that revenue for the period grew nearly 45 percent to $92.4 million, versus $63.8 million for the same period last year, while net income rose to $3.9 million, compared with a loss of $1.4 million for the third quarter of 2007. However, the firm also reports a net loss for the first nine months of the year, although the loss is lower than for the same period of last year ($0.19 per share vs. $0.48 per share).

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The last week saw a variety of deals across innovation industries in New England, but the biggest ones came from biotech and cleantech.

—Ironwood Pharmaceuticals raised $50 million from lead investor Morgan Stanley Investment Management and many of the Cambridge, MA-based biotech’s previous investors. Ironwood plans to use the funds in part to advance linaclotide, a treatment for irritable bowel syndrome, through Phase 3 clinical trials.

—Link Medicine of Cambridge, MA, closed a massive $40 million Series C financing round with Clarus Ventures and SV Life Sciences. Built around the research of Harvard Medical School neurologist Peter Lansbury, Link is working on new treatments for neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

—Barre, VT-based Northern Power Systems raised $37 million in a Series A financing led by Boston-based Rockport Capital Partners and Allen & Company of New York. The firm is developing a wind-cooled permanent magnet turbine drive system that is says will be more efficient than traditional wind turbines at lower wind speeds.

—Waltham, MA-based employee recruiting and retention software maker Authoria agreed to be acquired by White Plains, NY-based private equity firm Bedford Funding for $63.1 million.

—Clinical Data (NASDAQ:CLDA) of Newton, MA, sold $25 million worth of stock and warrants to affiliates of Randal J. Kirk, the chair of the biotech company’s board.

—Commonwealth Capital Partners of Waltham, MA, led a $5 million Series A round of venture financing for Montreal-based Tungle. The Canadian startup makes free Web-based calendar groupware.

—Deepwater Wind, a subsidiary of Newton, MA-based First Wind, won a contract with the state of Rhode Island to lead the construction of a $1 billion offshore wind farm. The facility will aim to generate 1.3 million megawatt hours per year of electricity, equivalent to almost one-sixth of Rhode Island’s electricity usage.

—Woburn, MA, semiconductor design firm Kenet agreed to be acquired by Milpitas, CA-based semiconductor manufacturer Intersil (NASDAQ: ISIL) for an undisclosed sum.

—IRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) of Bedford, MA-based inked a $3.75 million deal with the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) to build and deliver two “Warrior 700″ robots, a larger relative of the firm’s Packbot devices that will be able to fight fires and explosives, clear buildings, and extract casualties from the battlefield.

—Auraria Networks, a content management and information analysis products provider in Boxborough, MA, reportedly raised $10 million in Series B funding led by Pilot House Ventures and joined by Matrix Partners.

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Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) said today that the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) will pay the company $3.75 million to build and deliver two “Warrior 700″ robots (pictured here.)

The Warrior, which has been under development for more than two years, is designed to serve as the big brother of iRobot’s popular Packbot device, which is already widely used for bomb-sniffing and other hazardous situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. With a longer chassis and a much greater payload capacity, the Warrior will be capable of explosives disposal, firefighting, clearing buildings, and even extracting casualties from the battlefield, the company says. Special “payload positioning” software allows the robot to rotate its four treads and change its center of gravity to carry loads across difficult terrain.

“We are confident that the iRobot Warrior will secure a strong foothold within infantry, first responders and combat engineers,” Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division, said in a statement. The company plans to start selling production units of the Warrior in 2009.

TARDEC, at the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, MI, is the Army’s laboratory for advanced military automotive technology. It develops manned and unmanned ground systems for combat support.

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The orders keep rolling in for iRobot. The Bedford, MA-based robot maker announced today that it has received two more orders from the U.S. Army involving its PackBot 510. The first is a $5.8 million order for spare parts and accessories for the robot, which soldiers use to detect roadside bombs and other hazards. The second is a $13.3 million order to deliver 165 additional PackBots to the Army by the end of next April. The orders are part of the existing $286 million “xBot” contract awarded to iRobot last fall during a dramatic court battle with rival Robotic FX, which we covered extensively.

The announcement comes on the heels of iRobot’s recent entry into the underwater robot market, and the news that co-founder Rod Brooks (an MIT roboticist and Xconomist) has stepped down as chief technology officer. Earlier this month, we also reported that iRobot has won a separate five-year, $200 million Army contract to deliver PackBots and other robots, spare parts, training, and repair services.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) has delivered more than 1,800 PackBots to date—and it shows no signs of slowing. “The U.S. Army continues to show its support for our PackBot line of robots and the immediate need for unmanned ground vehicles to assist soldiers,” said Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division, in a statement.

Dyer added that iRobot is now capable of delivering 100 PackBots per month to the U.S. Armed Forces. Now if it could just invent a robot that could stop us from going to war in the first place…

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It was a light week for dealmaking among New England tech and life sciences firms, but if Parametric finds a buyer that one could be a doozy.

—Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) inked an agreement to acquire Raleigh-Durham, NC-based Nekton Research—a maker of unmanned underwater robots—for $10 million up front and a potential $5 million in milestone payments. The move is part of iRobot’s big expansion into underwater vehicles.

—Boston-based Carbonite teamed up with China’s Lenovo to pre-install its online backup software on Lenovo’s IdeaPad and IdeaCentre computers. Carbonite also closed a $20 million financing round from existing investors Menlo Ventures, 3i Group, and CommonAngels, and new investor, Performance Equity.

—Parametric Technologies (NASDAQ: PMTC) of Needham, MA, a maker of software for computer-aided design and product lifecycle management, is exploring a sale in the $2 billion range, and has hired Goldman Sachs to recruit potential buyers.

—UpDown, a Cambridge, MA-based website that gives members $1 million in virtual money to invest in a portfolio of real companies and rewards them with cash when their virtual portfolios outperform the market, raised some real money of its own. Primary backer Joachim Schoss, a Swiss angel investor, put another $1 million into the startup.

—-Somerville, MA-based Echo Nest closed its first round of venture financing in a deal—the value of which was not disclosed—led by Commonwealth Capital Ventures. Echo Nest is developing Web-based software for music search, personalization, and interactivity.

—Prism VentureWorks of Needham, MA, led an $11 million Series B venture financing round for San Mateo, CA-based fraud prevention company Guard ID Systems. New investor Intersections (NASDAQ: INTX) and existing investor Trinity Ventures participated.

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Every company chairman likes to grow her business—and one common way to do that is by finding new revenue streams. It’s just that for most companies, that stream doesn’t turn out to be the ocean.

IRobot isn’t most companies. On Monday, the Bedford, MA-based maker of land-based military and consumer robotics dived deeper into the field of UUVs—unmanned underwater vehicles—by announcing its $10 million acquisition of North Carolina company Nekton Research, which makes a prototype UUV called the Ranger. It was iRobot’s second foray into underwater vehicles this year, coming on the heels of January’s announcement that the firm had signed an exclusive licensing deal with the University of Washington to develop and produce its Seaglider craft.

There are vast differences in these two UUVs. The Seaglider is propeller-less and motor-less, built to cruise around the ocean for months on end in various sensing and measurement roles. Nekton’s Ranger, by contrast, has a propeller and is meant for very short-range missions that include reconnaissance, port security, and mine clearing. But together they form two prongs of a carefully thought out growth strategy that goes way back—and that iRobot is only now beginning to reveal in any detail. I caught up with chairman Helen Greiner to get the low-down, if you will, including the story of how iRobot took the plunge into what she calls its “next frontier”: underwater vehicles.

“We first started thinking underwater probably around two years ago,” Greiner told me. The impetus was an examination of what areas of robotics could iRobot tap to expand its business. One of the hallmarks of robotics, Greiner says, is that it offers a wide variety of directions and opportunities—ground-based vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), industrial, consumer, military robots, and of course underwater vehicles (called UUVs or AUVs, for autonomous underwater vehicles—although in our conversation Greiner stuck to the term UUV). This diversity, she says, “is one of the wonderful things about the field. But we really looked at what is the next big opportunity to build the most on what iRobot does well.”

That desire to use existing expertise led them first to the military side of the house. IRobot’s military business, built around the Packbot, was going “gangbusters,” in Greiner’s words. The UAV market, though, was already pretty mature—and didn’t seem to offer a whole lot of ripe-for-the-plucking opportunity. “They got off to a start maybe 20 years ago,” Greiner says, which means that UAVs even pre-dated the ground vehicles iRobot creates. “It took them maybe 20 years to get to [a market size of] $500 million.”

Underwater vehicles, though, were still in their relative infancy, offering a better chance to get in on the ground (maybe ocean is a better term here) floor. “And,” Greiner says, “we see the kind of applications that UUVs are useful [for] exactly along the lines of our military division’s strategy.” By that, Greiner is referring to iRobot’s tagline of building robots for “dull, dirty and dangerous missions…” For the Army, the PackBots do such work as reconnaissance of unknown or dangerous territory and hunting for improvised explosive devices. The Navy, of course, is looking for similar help in the sea.

IRobot strategists read all the publicly available studies of UUVs, including the master plans the Navy puts out about robotic systems of the future, which include ideas about undersea recon, mine clearing, hydrographic survey, exploration and mapping, infrastructure inspection, port security, and more. IRobot also engaged in a more private study of the field (Greiner didn’t go into much detail about that). And it studied developments in the underwater robotics market, including the announcement last December that Hydroid, the Pocasset, MA-based maker of robot subs, was to be acquired for some $80 million by Kongsberg Maritime of Norway. (The deal was completed this summer—and in April, before it was done, came word that the Naval Oceanographic Office, the wing of the Defense Department responsible for charting the ocean bottom, had signed a five-year support contract with Hydroid.)

IRobot could have developed its own underwater vehicles. But, Greiner says, “we believe it would reduce our in-house product development timeline probably by 18 to 24 months to do…acquisitions.” In addition to the time and money commitment involved in ramping up a new field totally in-house came the risk of losing the company’s …Next Page »

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Calling the undersea market “the next frontier” for robotics, iRobot announced today that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire unmanned underwater robot and technology company Nekton Research of Raleigh-Durham, NC. IRobot said that it will pay $10 million up front for Nekton, with the potential to pay an additional $5 million if certain milestones are reached—and that the transaction is expected to close by this Friday.

“We believe that the underwater market is the next frontier for robots,” said iRobot chairman Helen Greiner in a statement. “This acquisition positions us for leadership in robot solutions on both the land and sea.” As part of the acquisition, Nekton’s president and CEO, Rick Vosburgh, will become executive director, Maritime Systems, and will take charge of iRobot’s newly created Maritime Programs office, which will be located in Raleigh-Durham.

The move is part of a major expansion for iRobot into underwater vehicles. In June, the company announced it had signed a sole licensing agreement to commercialize the University of Washington’s “Seaglider” underwater robot. The specific terms of the deal with UW TechTransfer were not disclosed, but the announcement marked iRobot’s first foray into the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) market.

Nekton’s customers include the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the Naval Undersea Warfare Command (NUWC). IRobot said the Nekton acquisition will have minimal effect on this year’s revenue, and that it anticipated the product and contract revenue from the deal to contribute between $6-8 million in 2009.  It also said the transaction would dilute shares by approximately $0.02 cents the next two years as it invested in productizing the North Carolina comany’s Nekton Ranger prototype.

It’s been a busy week for Bedford, MA-based IRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). Last Tuesday, the company announced its co-founder, MIT professor Rod Brooks, was stepping down from his CTO role to devote full-time to a new company, Heartland Robotics, which is focused on developing industrial and workplace robots. That same day, it gave news that it had won a U.S. Army contract to provide military robots, spare parts, training, and repair services in a deal that could total $200 million over the next 5 years. And on Wednesday, it announced three new models of its Roomba vacuum cleaner, two of which are tailored for cleaning up after pets.

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