Profile of Rodney Brooks, the Australian roboticist who in 1990 co-founded iRobot, which used to make robots for US army and is now popular for Roomba vacuums
The professor who got robots zipping through the world—and cleaning house—by challenging conventional wisdom in AI.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2019 MIT Technology Review profile catches Rodney Brooks at the high-water mark of the company he co-founded in 1990: months earlier iRobot had bought Root Robotics, a $199 educational robot maker, extending the Roomba franchise beyond floor cleaning. The profile frames Brooks as the contrarian who got robots moving through the real world by rejecting mainstream AI orthodoxy.
Read from today, the piece is an artifact of a vanished moment. Per the later coverage, US and EU regulatory pressure killed Amazon's $1.7B acquisition in 2024, and iRobot slid into slow collapse and Chapter 11 amid Chinese competition — while Brooks himself has re-emerged arguing that humanoid robots won't reach human-level dexterity with current methods.
First-order effects
- The profile lands as a counterweight to the humanoid-robotics hype cycle: Brooks, now building warehouse robots at Robust.AI, is one of the field's founders making the explicit case that current learning methods won't deliver human-level dexterity or safety for humans working alongside machines.
- For iRobot, the profile documents the founder-era identity — army robots turned household vacuums — that the company has since lost, with co-founder Colin Angle now out and discussing the bankruptcy and his own new startup.
Second-order effects
- iRobot's collapse under regulatory pressure and Chinese competition leaves the consumer robot-vacuum category open to the very rivals the Amazon deal was meant to pre-empt, shifting pricing and share away from the US pioneer.
- The killed acquisition becomes a template other robotics sellers and buyers must price in: big-tech exits for hardware startups now carry antitrust risk, pushing founders like Brooks and Angle toward independent ventures instead of acquisition outcomes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, first-wave consumer robotics companies prove poor custodians of their categories — the durable value migrates to whoever controls manufacturing cost and distribution, which in this market means Chinese competitors rather than the inventors.
- Brooks' trajectory — from behavior-based robotics pioneer to skeptic of embodied-AI moonshots like Alphabet's shut-down Everyday Robots — signals a structural split in the field between capital-intensive humanoid bets and narrower, deployable automation such as warehouse robots.
The trend: Consumer robotics is splitting between collapsed Western pioneers and low-cost Asian manufacturers, while founding-generation roboticists recycle into skeptical, narrowly-scoped automation ventures.