Had you met Helen Greiner when she was a student at MIT in the late 1980s, you might not have pegged her as the future head of a consumer and military products company. She was quiet, a bit shy, and, as even she would agree, something of a nerd. But she shares a key trait with many successful business leaders -- a passion for something. In her case, it happens to be robots.

That passion led Greiner -- along with Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks -- to found what would become iRobot in 1990. Over the past four years, iRobot has sold more than 1.5 million robots for cleaning people's floors and has deployed more than 300 tactical military robots in Iraq. The company completed its initial public offering on November 15, 2005.

Greiner recently gave a presentation at Wharton sponsored by the School's entrepreneurship and technology clubs, after which she sat down with Knowledge@Wharton to talk about her fascination with robots and what impact robots have, and will have, on our everyday lives.

Knowledge@Wharton: How did you first become interested in robots?

Greiner: I saw Star Wars when I was 11 -- in the theater -- and I was enthralled by R2D2 because he was more than a machine. He was a character, he had a personality, and he was really one of the stars of the show.

Knowledge@Wharton: Is it true that, at the time, you didn't know that R2D2 was played by an actor in a costume?

Greiner: Yes. My big brother told me that Kenny Baker actually played R2D2, and that burst my bubble a slight amount. But, at the time, I was hacking on a computer, a [Radio Shack] TRS-80 that my parents had bought for the family. I could see the connection between what was shown in science fiction, in Star Wars, and what could be built in the future with technologies that were just emerging for the computer industry at the time.

Knowledge@Wharton: What's the goal of iRobot as a company?

Greiner: Our goal at iRobot is to build practical and affordable robot systems. We are not there to do demonstrations of technology. We are not there to talk about stuff that's going to happen 50 years from now in robots -- although that's going to be extremely exciting. We really concentrate on practical and affordable systems for today.

For example, we have 1.5 million Roombas helping people clean their homes everyday. You push a button, it comes out and does the sweeping and vacuuming. When you get back [home], it's on its charging station charging itself. Our Roombas run between $150 and $330 -- practical and affordable.

Knowledge@Wharton: You have just talked about one of your consumer products, the Roomba, and you have another consumer product, the Scooba. But your earlier products were government and industrial robots. Tell us about those.

Greiner: Our first products were designed for research labs. [After people started] calling MIT and saying, "Can we buy what was created there?" we thought, "Hey, there must be a commercial application here." We now have military products in combat, [including] more than 300 Packbots helping our troops in Iraq. Terrorists are littering the country with thousands of bombs. The [military] used to send solders, wearing bomb suits, to [try and safely detonate] them. Now they send our robots [instead]. So the solders get to stay at a safe distance. The robots today have been credited with saving the lives of dozens of U.S. soldiers. We're really proud of that work.

Knowledge@Wharton: I don't think anyone would object to having a robot vacuum the floor, but do you find resistance to robots as a concept -- doing tasks that humans have been doing? Is there a science fiction element of this that makes people nervous?

Greiner: I don't really think so. When computers first came out, you had a lot of people worried that computers were going to obsolete humans and that they were going to take over everything. So you had everything from [the movie] The Colossus Project to Hal in 2001. I think it's a way for society to work through their fears. Once people have a computer on their desk and they see what it's good at doing and, more especially, what it's not good at doing, they don't have the same fear anymore. It's the same with robots. Once people have a Roomba in their home and it's doing the sweeping and vacuuming for them, but they see the things it can't do yet, they really don't fear robots taking over the world.

Knowledge@Wharton: What about the opposite situation: Once they get one, do they start to treat it like a pet?

Greiner: Our customer base -- homemakers, people who just want to get the vacuuming job done, people who are used to doing it themselves -- buy the Roomba as an appliance, but once they get it home, it's going around, it's following the wall, it's getting around the furniture, it doesn't fall down the stairs, it has bleeps and bloops to communicate. The only thing in their experience that has acted that way has been a pet. So people actually start to name it. You don't see anyone name their toasters but a lot of people tell me they have named their Roomba.

Knowledge@Wharton: What is yours named?

Greiner: That's a really good question! Mine is named "Arnold". One of them. [There are] a few others that all have names, too.

Knowledge@Wharton: What's next in the area of domestic robots?

Greiner: We just announced Scooba, a floor-washing robot. It's really cool because it takes the place of mopping or scrubbing the floors. It cleans up the debris and then it puts down a fluid that we have developed with Clorox. It scrubs it in and then it picks it up on the back end. It's a whole new process for getting the floors clean. And you don't have to push it around because, like the Roomba, it's an autonomous robot. It entirely takes the place of doing the job by hand.

Knowledge@Wharton: When did you first get the idea that you could build a practical consumer robot?

Greiner: We started the company in 1990, and it's always been centered on robots. But it wasn't until about 1999 that we began working on the Roomba development. We first put it on the market in the fall of 2002, and it's been going strong ever since.

首页 上一页 1 2 下一页 尾页 跳转到 12页