Listening to Customers to Unlock the Future of Innovation

With 30 years under our belt and over 30 million robots sold, iRobot is an established leader in the emerging consumer robot industry – but it hasn’t always been that way. Prior making the choice to apply all of our effort to solving the needs of home users, iRobot was a company that developed robotic solutions for a variety of markets.

In a recent conversation with Scott Kirsner of Innovation Leader during their “Success Stories 2021,” I had a chance to look back on some of the robots of iRobot’s past and discuss how they enabled us to create a culture that drives innovation by listening closely to our customers. While none of these innovative robots was as commercially successful as the Roomba is today, each of them was a success in its own right and played a role in helping iRobot better direct and refine our innovation process.

A couple of the highlights:

• PackBot helped save lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as assisting with the shutdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant. When first launched, the PackBot was impossibly complicated to drive, never mind using it to delicately remove an explosive device. That all changed when an EOD tech beat the team at HALO and showed us what was possible using a standard gaming controller.
• Seaglider is an underwater unmanned robot which was originally designed for academic researchers to measure temperature, salinity and other quantities in the ocean. Following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, customers and iRobot engineers asked us to look into using the robot to detect the formation of underwater pools of oil. Teams at iRobot applied the right sensors, and we drove it down to Louisiana (in the back of a pickup truck) to help evaluate the impact on the environment!

These robots showed us what we could achieve when we applied our technology to solve a specific problem. From there, it was essential to perfect the system by listening to customer feedback and focus our impact. This was a very important lesson to learn as a company, and it’s a core reason why the Roomba has been so successful.

Throughout the years, iRobot has adjusted our approach to innovation by listening closely to customers. Roomba users told us, “Having a robot just try to do the right thing on its own is like having a cleaning person at home that I can’t talk to or direct.  What I need is a robot I can interact and partner with at home.”

Through this we realized that autonomy is not the pinnacle of artificial intelligence. What we actually had to do was figure out ways for robots to be more collaborative with their owners. In 2020 we took a major step toward that goal with the launch of iRobot Genius, a platform that gives you greater control of where, when and how your robot cleans.

Now, the next step will be controlling the robots by voice, and having them understand exactly what you mean. You want to be able to say, “Hey Roomba, clean under kitchen table! I just ate lunch.” That’s where the role of robots in our lives begins to change.

To achieve this, iRobot’s innovation process has to include developing rich relationships with our customers. Our robots need to know what you call the rooms in your home, and we need you to know that you can trust us with this information.

This is why we are now focused on the development of what we call “collaborative intelligence,” which is a combination of machine learning, visual object recognition, natural language processing, privacy and relationship-building. These capabilities enable the seamless interaction between human and robot, which is what will lead to robots doing even more to make our lives better.

I look forward to sharing more on these developments as they become a reality! What features or capabilities would you like to see in the next wave of robotic innovation?