Free Republic

Q. You recently won some big contracts with the United States military and the German military for your PackBot robots, which can be used to dispose of improvised explosive devices. A. The use of I.E.D.’s by the enemy, specifically in Iraq, is driving this interest. Locating these bombs is extremely threatening and then to defuse them is an incredibly challenging job. Robots are proving to be highly effective to address this. Now, rather than put a soldier at risk, you can put a robot at risk. Q. Where are those robots being used now? A. We have over 500 PackBot...

The female mannequin at iRobot’s headquarters in Burlington, MA, is fairly typical: tall and thin, with perfect features and fingernails painted claret red. But instead of designer clothes, she’s modeling combat fatigues and a camouflage vest with a 500-megahertz computer system embedded in it. An eyepiece is mounted over one eye, and she holds a joystick to control the accompanying PackBot, a small, tanklike robot recently deployed in military missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. “She’s looking particularly stylish for a soldier,” quips Helen Greiner ’89, SM ’90, president and cofounder of iRobot. Thanks to PackBot and the Roomba Intelligent FloorVac,...

CAMP PENNSYLVANIA, Kuwait — While airborne robots, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles, first gained notoriety in Operation Desert Storm, a treads-on-the-ground cousin, the “Packbot,” has now debuted in Operation Iraqi Freedom.