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GCN Home > 06/26/06 issue

Colin Angle | Tuning in to robot wisdom

Interview withColin Angle, CEO of iRobot Corp.

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Chatty, multitalented, walking gizmos such as Ronnie the Robot or R2-D2 come to mind when people think of robots. In fact, the leading robot builder today, iRobot Corp. of Burlington, Mass., found success shedding such anthropomorphistic perceptions. Since its start in 1990, the company has built software-driven, semi-autonomous machines—call them robots if you will—for specialized tasks. The company’s handy-as-heck Roomba Vacuuming Robot has become a cultural icon. But iRobot also has delivered more than 300 tactical mobile robots, called PackBots, to the Defense Department for executing dangerous tasks.

CEO Colin Angle started the company while still in college, with two other robot enthusiasts, fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Rodney Brooks, who is now chief technology officer, and Helen Greiner, now chairwoman of the board. Angle talked with GCN about where most robot researchers went wrong in their development and how the PackBot is used in Iraq.

GCN: How did iRobot’s approach differ from other robot companies at the time?

Angle: Early in the robot industry, there was this idea that a robot had to follow this serial progression, called Sense, Plan and Act. Sense refers to using the robot’s sensors to create an internal three-dimensional reconstruction of the environment. Then, based on that internal model, the robot should figure out what exactly should happen and create a precise plan to move.

By following this strategy, researchers were creating these unwieldy and wildly expensive systems. The problem is that it is nearly impossible to create this sort of Cartesian internal model. The internal model rapidly becomes obsolete [because] we live in a dynamic world. Creating a detailed plan is also very difficult because it requires the robot to be very precise. Both of those are difficult assumptions to actually follow through on.

So Rodney Brooks looked at that and said, “Let’s think about this thing in a different way.” Insects survive pretty well, and they don’t require some vast amount of computational power. So Rod developed a notion of using the environment as its own model. Rather than creating a plan based on an internal model, let’s see how far we can get with heuristics and strategies. Only when we hit a wall, if you will, do we try to figure out what we need to model.



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