Do you ever sit down with a friend who wants to show you all their latest vacation pictures? (Maybe not as much since photo-sharing sites took off.) Well, yesterday’s kickoff of the Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering was just like that—if your friend were Charles Simonyi, a software billionaire, showing you videos from a $35 million vacation in space.

Simonyi, the father of Microsoft Word and Excel, and now head of Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software, regaled the crowd of a couple hundred students, faculty, and guests with stories and videos from his second trip to space last March. Simonyi rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), docked and spent some time there, and returned safely to Earth, looking none the worse for wear. He is an outspoken proponent of space tourism, and he pointed out that Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, is currently making his way aboard the space station as “the first clown in space” (and the seventh space tourist ever).

Just a few interesting tidbits that stood out to me:

—Seattle and Mercer Island look very pretty from space. “You can’t see the Great Wall or the Pyramids, but you can see Sea-Tac,” Simonyi said. You can also see clouds, lightning storms, and jet contrails, the latter especially over North America. Watching the sunrise from orbit is spectacular.

—The instruments on the spacecraft look refreshingly antique. You think they’d be slick and modern-looking, but the inside of the Soyuz and space station look like they’re out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. In fact, some instruments date back to 19th century designs (”tried and true”), and software on the rocket runs on an Intel 386 processor from the ’80s. “Older chips are more resistant to radiation,” Simonyi explained.

—Bodily functions are funny in space. You wear a lightly applied tourniquet to keep blood flowing in your legs; you get a puffy face from lack of circulation; the toilet is an engineering marvel …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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Heartland Robotics confirmed today that it has raised $7 million in a Series A-1 venture financing round, a story first reported by Xconomy on August 21. The lead funder in the round was Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, according to Heartland president Patrick Sobalvarro. Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based venture investing operation of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, also participated.

Heartland’s announcement, also detailed in a forthcoming press release, is the first time the Cambridge, MA-based company has gone public with information about its investors. Our earlier story, which was based on a regulatory filing and interviews with anonymous sources, did not name Charles River Ventures as a participant in the new round. According to the information released today, Bezos Expeditions and BrooksLab, LLC, which is headed by Heartland Robotics founder and chief technical officer Rodney Brooks, participated a previously unreported $5 million Series A round sometime in 2008—meaning the stealth-mode company has raised about $12 million all told.

Sobalvarro tells Xconomy that Heartland’s attraction to Charles River Ventures boiled down to experience—both the firm’s, and that of Devdutt Yellurkar, the CRV partner working with Heartland. “I think Charles River has a lot of experience with innovative, early-stage companies, and Devdutt in particular has run companies building complex products involving a lot of software, [including] as the CEO of Yantra,” Sobalvarro says. “That kind of experience really brings a lot to the table when you’re building and early-stage company.”

But Heartland was also looking for a venture firm with demonstrated fundraising traction, Sobalvarro says. “The thing that anybody needs to be conscious of when the economy is the way it is right now is that some venture firms have been really successful in closing new funds and others haven’t,” he says. “Frankly, CRV closed a new fund in the spring and that meant a lot to us.”

Heartland continues to be somewhat guarded about its technology, saying only that it is designed to make manufacturing more productive and efficient. “We’re doing an innovative kind of robot for …Next Page »

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Much of the buzz about Amazon’s surprise announcement yesterday that it is acquiring popular online shoe retailer Zappos for more than $900 million is about whether the Las Vegas-based company really needed to sell, or was pressured to do so by its main venture backer, Sequoia Capital. But the first thing I wondered when I heard the news was what the acquisition might mean for Kiva Systems, the Woburn, MA, startup whose robots staff a huge Zappos distribution center in Louisville, KY.

Zappos has been working with Kiva for almost two years, and the company’s shelf-toting robots, which help speed the process of order fulfillment, have been operating in the Louisville location for over a year. And in fact, the shoe seller recently ordered more Kiva gear to prepare for the holiday rush, says Kiva CEO Mick Mountz, whom I reached by phone this morning. “We don’t know anything more than what’s in the press right now, but our reaction is that this is a good thing for Kiva,” Mountz says. “They’re growing quickly, and growing their Kiva system to support that. If you take the press releases at face value, they are going to keep the two companies separate, and it’s all about growth. What that implies to us is that they’re going to need more Kiva equipment to keep doing that.”

Indeed, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh said in an open letter to employees that the Louisville warehouse might even grow into a hub for Amazon’s own inventory. “As many of you know, we were strategic in choosing our warehouse location due to its proximity to the UPS Worldport hub in Louisville,” Hsiesh wrote. “Amazon does not have any warehouse locations that are closer to the Worldport hub. There is the possibility that they may want to store some of their inventory in our warehouse or vice-versa. Right now, both Zappos and Amazon believe that the best customer experience is to continue running our warehouse in Kentucky at its current location.”

Kiva’s whole mission is to help companies get products off the warehouse shelves where they’re stored and into boxes for shipment to consumers faster, using agile wheeled robots that carry the shelves to stock pickers. That means Amazon has always been one of Kiva’s dream customers—and now, thanks to the Zappos acquisition, it’s an actual one. “What that means to our business is that the number-one and number-two e-retailers are now using Kiva, the number two being Staples,” says Mountz.

E-commerce companies have been Kiva’s strongest customers lately, according to Mountz. “From where we sit, e-commerce is doing pretty well right now,” he says. “Diapers.com recently got some expansion gear from us. Quiet Logistics, which is supporting the Gilt Groupe, just purchased some additional gear.”

And if Amazon wants to keep expanding at its current rate, it’s going to have to look at warehouse automation technologies, Mountz believes. “If you look at their business, they are at $20 billion a year and growing at 5 percent. That means they need to add a billion dollars of capacity a year—that means opening one or two new distribution centers every year. Along those lines, the Zappos folks have plenty of space down in Louisville, and a great location next to the UPS Worldport hub, so if we had to predict, we’d think they’re going to end up using that building for even more beyond the growth Zappos has planned.” [Update: In a follow-up e-mail, Mountz noted that Amazon's recent growth rate has actually been closer to 15 percent or $3 billion in additional gross revenues every year.]

Meanwhile, Kiva is busy building and delivering the equipment Zappos needs for the holidays, Mountz says. “We have ongoing, project-level dialogue with Zappos every week, and we’ll just have to see what they learn over time,” he says. “We think Kiva is going to be a big part of their material handling as they go forward.”

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“Robot coming through…Robot.”

That was the cry, heard throughout the day Saturday at Boston University’s Agganis Arena, scene of the Boston regional finals of the annual FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics competition. The robots were constantly on the move as teams ushered them back and forth from the competition area—think basketball, with lots of twists for this year’s theme—to the staging area/work zones “backstage.”

As always, the finals were a wild affair with lots of screaming and yelling, blaring rock music, face paint galore, and costumes that would have done Rocky Horror fans proud (to give you a clue, the guy announcing all the teams wore a cape and skated around the floor on roller blades). I was there for much of the morning, speaking with competitors and planners and a few guests that included iRobot founders Helen Greiner (an Xconomist) and Colin Angle, human genome sequencer Craig Venter, Marc Hodosh (another Xconomist and chair of Boston FIRST), and FIRST National Advisor and MIT engineering professor Woodie Flowers, among others. (Flowers was lowered by cable from the rafters at last year’s FIRST event, to the tune of Mission Impossible. This year, he told me, “I came in through the back door.”) I didn’t speak to annual judge Steve Wozniak, a founder of Apple Computer, because he wasn’t there. The reason: he will compete on Dancing With the Stars, which airs tonight. The entire crowd, though, did a shout out to him at Friday night’s opening, crying out in unison: “GOOD LUCK WOZ!” (Hodosh says they are sending in the video to the TV show, in hopes it will air tonight.)

Some 53 teams, most, but not all (see below) from around New England, took part in the event. But that’s just a fraction of the entire competition. Last year, when you include all age groups taking part in FIRST, the organization drew more than 160,000 young people from 38 countries worldwide. What I saw was just a piece of the high-school category, which itself drew 1,500 teams last year—and should be even bigger this year.

The basic idea for the high-school event is that all teams must begin with the same core electronics and motors. They then can spend up to another $3,500, with no part costing more than $400, to fine-tune and evolve their robots, which enter into “coopetition”—both competing against and cooperating with—other teams in a series of ever-changing alliances.

This year’s game was called Lunacy. It was a basketball-type game played on a hockey rink-type floor (without the ice). As the game description goes, “Two three-team robot alliances …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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Kiva Systems in Woburn, MA, said today that Gap Inc. Direct, which handles online orders for clothing chains Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, and Piperlime, will install Kiva’s robotic fufillment system in its warehouses. As we explained in an April 2008 profile, Kiva’s robots are designed to speed the movement of merchandise around a warehouse floor, bringing items on movable shelves to stationary order-pickers in a just-in-time fashion. The deal represents a big win for Kiva, whose largest previous customers included Zappos and Diapers.com.

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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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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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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 may still be a while before robots can actually change diapers, but at least they can help move them around inside warehouses. That’s the word today from Kiva Systems, the Woburn, MA-based maker of “automated fulfillment systems”—i.e. fleets of squat orange robots designed to move shelves to human order pickers, rather than forcing workers to endlessly walk warehouse aisles. Online retailer Diapers.com plans to install Kiva systems at all three of its distribution centers, where they will “store, move and sort a variety of baby products, including diapers, wipes, formula, bottles and clothes,” according to a statement from Kiva.

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Sadly, my old Roomba Red robot vacuum cleaner is now collecting dust—and not in the way it’s supposed to. Its rechargeable battery no longer recharges, and iRobot charges $70 for a replacement. I figure that’s money I might as well put toward a newer model. And now I’m sorely tempted: today Bedford, MA-based iRobot launched two new Roomba models designed especially for homes with hairy pets.

When my old Roomba was still kicking, it was a huge blessing, since I have a long-haired Australian Shepherd who sheds copiously. My only complaints about the device were that its dirt bin filled up with hair so fast, and that I had to pick dog hair out of the brushes after every outing. Cleaning the brushes was so time-consuming that it almost canceled out the convenience of having a robotic vacuum.

The new Roomba 532 features improvements intended to address those two issues. It has an additional “sweeper bin” that’s 3.5 times the size of the old vacuum bin, as well as an extra set of brushes and special cleaning tools for keeping the brushes hair-free. According to the company, the 532 also has “counter-rotating brushes” that “reach deep into carpets to pull out pet hair and dander.” I’m already salivating.

The new Roomba 562 has everything the 532 has, plus one more set of brushes, a more capacious battery, and an on-board scheduling feature, allowing owners to program the vacuum to sweep automatically up to seven times a week, returning to its home base to recharge when it’s done. The Roomba 532 goes for $349 and the 562 is priced at $399.

Of course, while many people buy Roombas to clean up after their pets, there’s another group of iRobot customers who buy them to entertain their pets. (John Landry, the former CTO of Lotus who’s now in the venture capital business, let slip after a recent Xconomy forum that he’s one of the latter.) So far, iRobot hasn’t come out with a robot tailored especially for the latter group—unless you count the ConnectR, a “virtual visiting” robot that the company is currently beta-testing with a limited group of users and that can be used, according to iRobot’s marketing materials, to “tell Fido he’s a ‘good boy’ even while you’re on vacation.”

The company did, however, bring out one more Roomba model today: the new $599 “Roomba 610 Professional Series” robot (pictured at left), designed to vacuum large areas like offices or retail spaces. It comes with interchangeable sweeper bins—so that you can swap a full one for an empty one without delaying the robot in its appointed rounds, apparently—and it’s capable of using up more of its battery power before automatically returning to its recharging station.

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MIT roboticist Rod Brooks, one of three co-founders of iRobot and mentor to the other two (chairman Helen Greiner and CEO Colin Angle), is stepping down from his role as the company’s CTO in order to launch his own robotics firm, iRobot announced today. Brooks’ startup, called Heartland Robotics, will focus on industrial and workplace robots with the aim of boosting U.S. competitiveness. It will not, however, compete with iRobot—indeed, Brooks will act as a special consultant to the Bedford, MA-based firm and remain on its board of directors. IRobot said it will begin the search for a new CTO in 2009.

IRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), whose stock is down some 40 percent from its 52-week high despite winning a series of government contracts (including a new $200 million Army contract announced this morning) and a big trade secrets lawsuit in the past year, made it clear that the partial parting with Brooks was amicable. “Rod has been an integral part of iRobot over the years, playing a large role in the company’s success,” said Angle in a statement. “We are fortunate that he will continue to be a part of the company, lending his expertise and knowledge to our roadmap forward.”

Brooks was also named chair of a new technical advisory board that iRobot will soon be forming. In a phone call, Greiner said the purpose of the board is “to make sure iRobot stays on top of robot technology and make sure that we’re a leader in getting technology into the field and into homes today—and make sure that we stay in that leadership position from a technology point of view. It could [also] be seeing what else is going on out there and determining the direction of which technologies we choose to develop here.” She described Brooks as “a wonderful person to run our tech advisory board. He’s one of the top robotics researchers in the world today. You really can’t do better than Rod Brooks.”

Little information was given in the release about Heartland. The company’s website is essentially a splash page bearing the message: “Heartland Robotics is combining the power of computation—embodied in robots—and the extraordinary intelligence of the American workforce, to rehumanize and revitalize manufacturing.” It also offers visitors a chance to sign up for a mailing list and inquire about jobs.

However, Xconomy was able to reach Brooks (an Xconomist) this afternoon by phone. He said he will also be taking a leave from his position at MIT, where he is Panasonic Professor of Robotics, to work full time on the new venture, which has already rented space on the second floor of 485 Massachusetts Avenue—the same building that houses design firm IDEO—in the heart of Cambridge’s Central Square. He will be joined there by Ken Zolot (also an Xconomist), a serial entrepreneur who has guided a slew of MIT spinouts through their early business plan development phase, among them Arch Therapeutics, Myomo, and A123 Systems. Zolot founded and has been directing MIT’s Innovation Teams program, where students spend a semester working in MIT labs evaluating strategies for bringing lab discoveries to market. Like Brooks, Zolot will leave MIT to work full-time at the robotics startup. Brooks will serve as Heartland’s chairman and CTO, Zolot as the company’s CEO.

Zolot, reached first by e-mail and then in the call with Brooks, said that Heartland is actively recruiting employees and has already closed …Next Page »

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Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) said today that the U.S. Army has awarded it a contract for military robots, spare parts, training, and repair services that could bring the company up to $200 million over the next 5 years and give the Army more flexibility to order robots for new missions.

The Army uses iRobot’s Packbot robots in Iraq to remotely investigate hazardous situations and environments. It obtains those robots under two separate contracts: the $286 million “Xbot” contract, which was awarded to iRobot last fall after a dramatic legal battle with now-defunct rival Robotic FX, and another so-called “indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity” contract that ran out in May 2008. The new contract, issued by the Army’s Robotic Systems Joint Project Office, replaces the expired one, but is even more indefinite, covering Packbots and other types of robot products and services that the Army may require in the future.

According to iRobot chairman Helen Greiner, that could include next-generation “small unmanned ground vehicles” or SUGVs, miniature surveillance bots that iRobot is developing in partnership with the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.

“What distinguishes the two contracts is that the Xbot contract was for a specific user community, the infantry, who wanted to remove ordnance more quickly and came up with specific requirements for that,” Greiner says. “Whereas this is more of an omnibus contract that leaves room open for different types of robots from iRobot. There is an ongoing war effort, and there are new applications coming up for robots in the field. This leaves it open so that if the military needs items for different user communities, we can expand our product offerings under this contract as the Army requires.”

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The last time I saw a Negotiator robot was in a federal courtroom in Boston, where Jameel Ahed—the founder and CEO of Robotic FX and the defendant in an intellectual-property-theft lawsuit brought by his former employer, iRobot—was driving the nimble little device around the judge’s bench via remote control. Robotic FX lost that suit last December, and as part of the settlement agreement, the Chicago, IL-based startup closed down and handed over some of its assets to iRobot—including the plans for the Negotiator, a tank-treaded device that can climb stairs and carry equipment such as video cameras and hazardous-materials sensors.

Now the controversial robot is about to be reborn, as a full-fledged iRobot product that will be available by the end of the year to police, fire departments and other agencies that need an inexpensive reconnaissance device for dangerous situations.

Even before Robotic FX went out of business, iRobot’s allegations about misappropriated trade secrets had cost the tiny startup a $280 million contract to deliver some 3,000 bomb-detecting robots to the United States Army—a contract that was later awarded to iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT). This was always the real payoff desired by the Bedford, MA-based robot maker, which had argued in court that Ahed had stolen elements of the design of its Packbot tactical robot, including methods for making the all-important treads, upon leaving the company in 2002. But it’s an interesting footnote to the case that by selling a few hundred Negotiators—which will be priced at about $20,000 apiece—iRobot may now be able to earn back the $2.9 million it spent on the Robotic FX lawsuit, and then some.

iRobot’s version of the Negotiator “is very much the design that came over as an asset in the settlement,” says Joe Dyer, president of iRobot’s government and industrial robots division. “The difference is that we have taken the robot, which was based on our design and our mobility but was being made, frankly, in a very crude production facility, and we have professionalized the quality, reliability, and manufacturing.” Ahed and a small group of employees had assembled their version of the robot in a basement space under Ahed’s father’s dental practice; iRobot, by contrast, is building the Negotiator at its engineering and manufacturing facilities in Mysore, India, outside Bangalore. …Next Page »

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The future of robotics lies in… arranging potted plants? Surprising, but it just might be true. Tonight at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, a small company called Q Robotics, based in Groton, MA, gave its first public presentation on the technology it has been developing for the past year and a half. Founded by iRobot veterans Joe Jones and Paul Sandin, co-inventors of the Roomba vacuuming robot, Q Robotics’ project has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the veil has been lifted, and what’s underneath is more interesting than it might seem at first glance.

I caught up with Jones, the CTO and 24-year robotics veteran, by phone earlier today. The story of Q Robotics began the day before Thanksgiving in 2006, when Jones and Sandin left iRobot to start a new robot company. “We wanted to invent something, but we didn’t know what,” says Jones. “We wanted to build more practical robots that people could afford, that served actual needs, and that we could build in the near-term… Floor-cleaning robots are wonderful and make a good business, but what do you do next?”

In February 2007, they got an idea at a trade show in Boston called New England Grows, for people who grow ornamental plants—which are bought by everyone from landscapers and homeowners to dentists’ offices. It turns out there are several thousand growers of potted plants scattered around the country, and they grow the plants by the millions on vast fields. Moreover there’s a widespread problem in the industry, and it has to do with the spacing between pots. As the plants mature, the pots need to be moved around and adjusted to keep plants from growing into one another. Growers spend tens of millions of dollars a year on manual labor, just to monitor the pots’ positions and space them correctly in the fields.

Enter Q Robotics. Jones and Co. are building a team of small robots to roll around in fields, pick up potted plants, and space them appropriately. Each robot is roughly cylindrical, 20 inches in diameter and 15 to 18 inches tall, with two big wheels. The latest model (see photo) has a forklift-like mechanism with which to pick up pots. Each unassuming bot also has infrared range sensors to detect positions of objects and an optical sensor to tell whether it has properly grabbed a pot.

“It’s not glamourous, but there is a clear market need for this,” says Jones. And there are plenty of follow-on opportunities in agriculture that would use similar technology, he says, such as soil monitoring, sorting, and loading and unloading goods.

And the broader significance to robotics? “We wanted to make robots that were one technology step harder than what we did before,” says Jones. “Earlier robots like Roomba functioned by rolling around and not getting stuck. These are different, they actually manipulate the environment.” To Jones’s knowledge, that kind of manipulation—performed out in the “unstructured” real world and not on a factory or warehouse floor, as in the case of Woburn, MA-based Kiva Systems—has not been done successfully before. In other words, it might be one small step for a Roomba, but one giant leap for robotics.

Jones says his four-person company (plus consultants) was originally bootstrapped and is in the process of getting outside funding now. It might be a couple of years before the company is ready to deliver robots to commercial customers, however. “We’ve hammered down the biggest technological risks. There are no show stoppers,” he says. What remains is to make the robots more reliable, durable, and waterproof so they’ll work in the rain, heat, and other outdoor conditions.

At the MIT Enterprise Forum tonight, CEO Charles Grinnell showed video of a prototype robot in action. He also unveiled the new name for the company, which is in the process of being incorporated: Harvest Automation. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer the intrigue of “Q Robotics.” Though I see that harvest automation could be a way to produce a bumper crop of new robot applications.

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Updated with photos from the event: I missed all the speeches, sorry about that. But I still had a great time yesterday afternoon at the grand opening of iRobot’s new headquarters—touring the offices, with its multiple coffee stations and places for employees to hang bikes, examining the Seaglider underwater vehicle, watching a demo of the ConnectR Internet-controlled “virtual visiting robot,” and talking to two of iRobot’s founders, chairman Helen Greiner and CEO Colin Angle, among various other guests and employees.

The offices occupy a prime corner of a Bedford, MA, office park just off Route 3, a location that’s a bit farther out and a lot less congested than that of iRobot’s previous HQ in Burlington, near the mall. The new space features wide aisles (for robots to drive through?), a bunch of testing rooms, and lots of room to grow. But for visitors the most interesting parts, not surprisingly, are the small robot museum just off the main entrance—behind glass doors labeled “Cool Stuff”—and the two adjacent demo rooms—one for military robots and one for consumer devices.

In the military demo room, I met the famous Tom Frost. I say famous because we at Xconomy wrote about Frost all through iRobot’s legal battles with Robotic FX this fall. Frost was the program manager for the PackBot, the military robot Robotic FX ultimately conceded it had knocked off. Frost has moved on to become program manager of Seaglider, which is the undersea vehicle iRobot recently licensed from the University of Washington. (Greg explored the strategy behind that deal.)

The Seaglider basically flies in the water, Frost explained, praising its “really, really elegant” design. With no moving parts, the person-sized device simply rides currents and changes its buoyancy to travel up and down. As Greg explained, “It can travel distances of several thousand kilometers—going out to sea for six or seven months at a time—diving to depths of up to 1 kilometer.” Frost said the vehicle surfaces periodically and points its tail end up, so that an antenna can transmit data collected from its sensors or receive mission updates from Iridium satellites.

Frost says right now about 70 Seagliders are out in the field. Most are used by oceanographers for research on things like sea salinity or algae concentration, but a few are with the U.S. Navy, which iRobot sees as a big customer going forward. A bright pink Seaglider was perched before us, and Frost almost winced at the color as he explained that the University of Washington chose the hue so that the robot would be easy to spot in the water. As for iRobot’s commercial version: “I can guarantee you it’s not going to be pink,” Frost said. “I don’t think pink is the right color for this market.” Frost says the company plans to get Seaglider—perhaps in a nice bright yellow—to market “right quick.”

Next, I walked into the consumer demo room, which featured a kitchen and a living area that was arguably nicer than my own, for a demo of the ConnectR, which was announced last fall at the Digital Life expo in New York. This robot, now in beta testing, is based on the Roomba 400 but comes equipped with WiFi, microphone, speakers, and video cameras, thereby allowing two-way voice and video conversations with people from remote locations. You can drive it around via the Internet, enabling you to stay in touch with kids, watch pets, and perhaps elderly parents. Colin Angle said …Next Page »

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Burlington, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced today that it has received a $3.3 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office to develop a soft, pliable robot that can “maneuver through openings smaller than its actual structural dimensions” to perform reconnaissance and urban search and rescue operations. IRobot will work with MIT and Harvard researchers to develop the so-called chemical robots, which will depend on advances in chemistry, materials science, and other fields.

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