Roomba’s Military Roots: The Untold Story

In the lobby of iRobot’s headquarters, a battered, tank-like PackBot robot nicknamed “Scooby Doo” stands on display, its metal shell marked with tally scores for every bomb it defused in Iraq(**). When that little robot was finally destroyed by an explosion, U.S. soldiers retrieved it and treated it “like a fallen comrade,” recalls Colin Angle, iRobot’s co-founder and chief executive. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, one of iRobot’s other inventions – the Roomba vacuum – is quietly whirring across a living room, dutifully sucking up dust bunnies beneath a sofa. At first glance, a bomb disposal robot and an automated vacuum cleaner seem to have nothing in common. But in fact, they share the same DNA. Both were born from the same company’s vision, and crucially, from the same technology. “The mission was to create practical robots that [would] touch our lives on a daily basis,” said Mr. Angle, an MIT graduate who founded iRobot in 1990 with fellow roboticists Helen Greiner and Rodney Brooks. It just so happens that fulfilling that mission meant first building robots for battlefields before they could come home to clean our floors.

From Battlefield to Living Room

iRobot, based in Massachusetts, began life as a small tech startup with big dreams – and very little funding. In its early years, traditional investors were skeptical that household robots could ever become a viable business. Venture capitalists “would literally laugh us out of the room,” Mr. Angle later admitted, noting how hard it was to raise money for consumer robots in the 1990s(**). The young company survived by turning to the U.S. government for support. Between 1990 and 2002, iRobot won at least six Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards from military agencies, totaling about $4.4 million(**). These competitive grants, administered by the Pentagon and other federal agencies, fund high-risk, high-reward R&D – exactly what iRobot needed to bridge the gap between lab experiments and real products. “I can say with absolute certainty that without the help of the SBIR program, iRobot could not have become the industry leader we are today,” Mr. Angle said in 2011, upon accepting an SBIR Hall of Fame award on the company’s behalf. The steady trickle of government contracts provided what private capital would not: patient investment in unproven technology, as well as a very demanding first customer in the U.S. military.

Those early SBIR-funded projects allowed iRobot’s engineers – many of them freshly minted from MIT – to develop core technologies in autonomous navigation, sensors and rugged mobility. In the late 1990s, the company secured contracts with the Army, Navy and DARPA (the Pentagon’s research arm) to build robots that could find land mines, survey dangerous terrain, and dispose of explosives. The culmination of that work was the iRobot PackBot, a compact tracked robot that could be thrown through a window or down a stairwell and then right itself, roll across rubble, climb up piles of debris, and neutralize bombs – all without putting a soldier in harm’s way(**). After the September 11, 2001 attacks, PackBots were rushed to Ground Zero in New York to help search the ruins of the World Trade Center for survivors(**). In the years that followed, more than 2,000 PackBots were deployed with U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they became lifesavers on missions to disarm roadside bombs (IEDs) and scout insurgent hideouts. Troops grew so attached to their bomb-bot buddies that they often gave them pet names; when one PackBot had completed 17 successful bomb disposals and was finally blown apart by an IED, soldiers mourned it as if it were one of their own.

As grim as these wartime applications were, they proved to be fertile ground for innovation. The Pentagon’s urgent needs pushed iRobot to solve problems that few others were tackling. If a robot could autonomously traverse a cave in Afghanistan or sniff out a land mine, could those same technologies help a robot navigate a cluttered living room or detect dirt on a rug? iRobot’s founders always believed the answer was yes. “We founded the business to go change the availability and role of robots in our lives,” Mr. Angle said in an interview, explaining that even while the company was building war machines, the ultimate goal was to create helpful robots for everyday people(**). The dual focus was unusual – “it was a little weird working on mine-hunting robots and then my next meeting would be about vacuuming,” Mr. Angle joked – but it was also strategically brilliant. The military work not only kept the lights on financially; it also yielded a trove of intellectual property that could be spun off into consumer products. “The military business was quite profitable,” Mr. Angle noted. “It enabled us to learn how to manufacture and… these vacuuming robots” by applying lessons from defense to the home.

War Tech in a Housecleaning Robot

By the early 2000s, iRobot had amassed over a decade of experience in robotics R&D – much of it funded by Defense Department grants and contracts – and the company was ready to attempt something radical. In September 2002, iRobot unveiled the Roomba, a $199 disc-shaped autonomous vacuum cleaner. It was an instant curiosity and perhaps the first consumer robot to truly capture the public’s imagination. What consumers did not see, however, was that the Roomba was effectively a direct descendant of those battlefield machines. Under the hood, the overlap between the bomb disposer and the dust disposer was considerable. The Roomba’s little brain ran on navigation algorithms originally developed to help PackBots maneuver through caves and rubble; those algorithms were now adapted to help a vacuum find its way around chair legs and coffee tables. The vacuum’s infrared “cliff sensors” – which prevent it from tumbling down stairs – were a peacetime spin-off of the technology designed to stop military robots from driving off ledges. Even Roomba’s renowned toughness (owners know the devices can survive collisions, tumbles, inquisitive pets, and other domestic abuse) was informed by the military’s durability requirements. iRobot had learned how to build robots that could handle being kicked, dropped or blown over – making their home appliance remarkably sturdy by consumer-electronics standards. “We had worked with the Defense Department on robots that could clear minefields, so we had this technology that we could apply to Roomba for coverage,” Mr. Angle later explained, referring to the Roomba’s methodical cleaning coverage of floors. In short, the Roomba was a textbook example of dual-use technology: innovations born for war finding an unlikely second life in our kitchens and living rooms.

When the Roomba debuted, it faced skepticism from vacuum industry incumbents and tech pundits alike – was this hockey-puck-like gadget a mere toy or a gimmick? – but consumers quickly embraced the idea of a robot maid. The first shipment of Roombas sold out with startling speed, and the device began popping up in pop culture cameos from Gilmore Girls to Saturday Night Live. In the two decades since its launch, the Roomba has become synonymous with home robotics. Its success helped create a multibillion-dollar market for robotic vacuums, now crowded with imitators, yet iRobot’s Roomba remains the category’s icon and leader. The company, which went public in 2005, has sold more than 50 million home robots worldwide as of this year(**), a statistic that would have sounded like science fiction back when iRobot’s founders were scraping for research grants in the ’90s. Roomba’s commercial triumph validated iRobot’s unorthodox strategy of pursuing both military and consumer tracks in parallel – a strategy only possible, Ms. Greiner (the co-founder) has noted, because early government funding “let us pursue both, and that cross-pollination was essential to our success”.

“Swords-to-Plowshares” in Action

In 2016, having firmly established Roomba and its sibling home robots as its core business, iRobot decided to exit the defense industry altogether. The company sold off its entire Defense & Security robotics division – including the PackBot line – to a private equity firm for $45 million, allowing iRobot to put “full focus on the home,” as Mr. Angle put it at the time. (The spun-off military robot business was rebranded as Endeavor Robotics, and later acquired by a larger defense contractor, but the PackBots and their progeny continue to be used by armed forces around the world.) Free from the volatile demands of military contracting, iRobot has concentrated on advancing its consumer robots – from floor moppers to lawn-mowing prototypes – and on integrating them into the burgeoning smart-home ecosystem(**).

Yet the company’s extraordinary journey from war rooms to living rooms is more than just a corporate strategy pivot; it’s a case study in how technology developed with public funding for national security can yield unanticipated benefits for everyday life.The story of the Roomba’s secret military origin shows the productive power of America’s investment in innovation. Taxpayer-funded programs like SBIR effectively turned a few million dollars of high-risk defense R&D into a whole new consumer industry – one that saves people time and labor every day. As Colin Angle reflected, those early government contracts “didn’t just fund our research – they forced us to solve really hard problems that we could later apply to consumer markets.” In other words, the Pentagon paid iRobot to build machines that could save soldiers’ lives, and in the process it unwittingly helped iRobot figure out how to build a machine that could save civilians from vacuuming their carpets. From bomb disposal in Baghdad to cleaning up pet hair in Portland, the arc of iRobot’s development reads like a real-life “swords to plowshares” tale – military swords remolded into domestic plowshares, with a little robotic brilliance and a lot of perseverance. And the next time you kick back on the couch watching your Roomba dutifully sweep the floor, you might pause to thank the unsung alliance between visionary engineers and farsighted public funding that brought this ingenious little war veteran into your home.