How iRobot lost its way home
According to reports, there’s something painfully american about the arc of irobot, the company that taught your vacuum to navigate around the furniture According to reports, founded in 1990 in bedford, massachusetts by mit roboticist rodney brooks and his former students colin angle and helen greiner, the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on sunday, ending a 35-year run that took it from the dreams of ai researchers to your kitchen floor and, finally, to the tender mercies of its chinese supplier Experts suggest that brooks, the founding director of mit’s computer science and artificial intelligence lab and the robotics field’s resident provocateur, spent the eighties watching insects and having epiphanies about how simple systems could produce complex behaviors According to reports, by 1990, he’d translated those insights into a company that would eventually sell over 50 million robots Experts suggest that the roomba, launched in 2002, became the rare gadget that transcended its category to become a verb, a meme, and, to the amusement of many, a cat-transportation device Experts suggest that the money soon followed, with the company raising $38 million altogether, including from the carlyle group, before going public in a 2005 ipo that raised $103 In recent developments, 2 million Interestingly, by 2015, irobot was flush enough to launch its own venture arm, prompting techcrunch to wryly declare that “robot domination may have just taken another step forward
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