The cofounder and chief technical officer of iRobot, the company that brought robotic vacuums to the homes of millions of consumers, is leaving to start another venture.
Rodney Brooks launched Bedford, Mass.-based iRobot in 1991 with Colin Angle and Helen Grenier, his former students. The roboticist plans to spend time with his new startup, Heartland Robotics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based industrial robotics company.
Heartland is not considered a competitor, according to iRobot.
Brooks, in a phone interview with us, said he can’t provide great detail about the new company just yet, but Heartland will focus on robots in manufacturing. Asked if the proposed robots would be developed to replace assembly-line workers, Brooks said, “PCs did not replace the office worker, and this is not about that at all.”
Brooks has also taken a leave of absence from his teaching role at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to concentrate on Heartland and recruit employees. “I’m on leave effective Monday, so I can put my heart and soul into this,” he said. “We need some time to get stuff together.”
Since Brooks was not able to talk about his departure until now, he is still ironing out his future role with iRobot’s management team. Brooks will remain on the board of directors and work with the company to form a new technical advisory committee. “We decided that that’s my task at iRobot,” he said.
A new CTO is expected to be named next year.
The robotics expert is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics at MIT and the former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Brooks received degrees in pure mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1981. Brooks has also held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. Brooks landed…