How iRobot lost its way home
There’s something painfully American about the arc of iRobot, the company that taught your vacuum to navigate around the furniture. 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. 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. By 1990, he’d translated those insights into a company that would…
