Is Amazon about to shake up home robotics?
Amazon has announced the $1.7 billion acquisition of iRobot, the company that manufactures the Roomba, the leading vacuum cleaner in the home robotics segment.
iRobot was founded in 1990 by three MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab alumni, Rodney Brooks, Helen Greiner and Colin Angle, who alone remains at the company and who will continue as CEO after the acquisition. Originally, the company designed and manufactured military robotics, but the success of the first Roomba, manufactured in 2002 and which has sold more than thirty million units, led it to spin off its military business in 2016, which still operates under the Endeavor Robotics brand and was recently acquired by FLIR Systems.
Amazon already has a Robotics division, and through the robots used at its warehouses has become a leader in the field. It bought Kiva Systems in March 2012 for $775 million, and now wants to move into domestic environments. Amazon’s development in that direction, Astro, is an “Alexa-on-wheels” robot that is currently in the functionality research phase.
What make iRobot interesting to Amazon is its experience in the development of microcartography systems, the maps of the homes in which its Roomba robots operate, which were already the subject of controversy years ago when it was suggested that it could market them to other companies, as…
