Helen Greiner

Cofounder of iRobot; founder of CyPhyWorks

• Born: December 6, 1967
• Place of Birth: London, England

Primary Company/Organization: iRobot

Introduction

Helen Greiner, a renowned roboticist and pioneer in the robot industry, is a cofounder and former president of iRobot, one of the largest independent robotics companies in the world. During her tenure at iRobot, the company moved from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology spin-off to an international leader in the industry. With a vision of designing robots that could be put to practical use in the consumer, industrial, academic, and military markets, Greiner developed robots that possessed greater mobility and intelligence than those previously in use. She brought the same imagination and ingenuity to CyPhyWorks, the company she founded in 2009. As chief executive officer (CEO) of CyPhyWorks, Greiner led the company in developing unmanned aerial vehicles. She subsequently applied her knowledge to advising the US military.

Early Life

Helen Greiner was born December 6, 1967, in London, England. Her father, a refugee from Hungary, and her mother, a native of Yorkshire, met at the University of London. They moved to the United States when Greiner was five. Greiner and her older brother grew up on Long Island, New York. With a mother who taught mathematics and science and a businessman father who had been a chemistry major, Greiner's abilities in mathematics and science were not unexpected. She played chess with her father at five, and by middle school she was hacking the family computer in order to control her brother's radio-operated cars. A defining moment came in 1977, when she saw Star Wars. R2-D2, the three-foot-tall android, captured her attention. Excited by a machine with intelligence, emotions, and gender, she was disillusioned when her brother revealed that R2-D2 was really controlled by a man inside a plastic costume. Her goal from that day became to create the R2-D2 she had imagined.

That goal led her to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). On her first day on campus, Greiner met Colin Angle, who shared her fascination with the science of robots. The two became friends, spending so much time together that friends thought there was a romance. However, Greiner and Angle were interested in the romance of making machines think like humans. The two worked in MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, headed by Rodney Brooks.

Greiner graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1989. She interned at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where she helped design robots that could make repairs in space. Her work there became part of her master's thesis. She received her master's in computer science from MIT in 1990 and returned to California, where she worked with California Cybernetics. Less than a year later, she returned to Massachusetts and joined Angle and Brooks to found iRobot Corporation.

Life's Work

In 1990, enthusiasm was high at the young company, which started in Angle's apartment. The partners adopted a motto: “Build cool stuff. Have fun. Change the world.” Two-thirds of that mission was easily completed; the final third took more time. Within two months of starting, iRobot had built its first robot. It took twelve years to sell one at a profit. Early efforts were primitive prototypes with microprocessors that the company sold to universities for $3,000 apiece. Greiner and her partners bought components at RadioShack, hired interns from MIT at minimum wage, and carried $100,000 in bank debt in addition to maxing out their own credit cards. They worked eighteen-hour days, taking only $30,000 in annual salaries. Their first break came in 1992, when Japan hired the company to develop designs for nanorobots for medical application, but payments for the $500,000 deal were frequently late.

U.S. government research contracts saved the company. In 1993, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and the Office of Naval Research awarded iRobot a $50,000 contract to build an underwater minesweeper. Although the device was never employed, more government contracts followed. After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Greiner and company won a $3 million Defense Department contract to build reconnaissance robots that could operate like minitanks to scope suspicious urban areas. Two years later, following the success Tamagotchi, the virtual pet, iRobot entered the toy market. In 1998, Hasbro agreed to a three-year exclusive contract and gave the company $1 million to develop My Real Baby, a robotic doll programmed to giggle, cry, and talk on cue. My Real Baby was on shelves in time for Christmas shoppers in 2000. On the high end of the doll market with a price tag of $96, My Real Baby sold 100,000 units.

With the company's success came recognition for its founders, particularly Greiner. She was named an Innovator for the Next Century by MIT's Technology Review in 2002. The next year, she was on Fortune's list of Top 10 Innovators under 40 in the United States. Greiner led the company through its initial public offering (IPO) in 2005, a move that raised $70.6 million. When iRobot expanded in the consumer and military categories, Greiner secured $35 million in venture funding. She also initiated the company's Government and Industrial Robots Division. Government research funding in this area led to the first deployment of robots in combat in Afghanistan and later in Iraq to search for enemy combatants and booby traps. PackBots, which carried a price tag of $45,000, proved well suited for use in the field because of their mobility and toughness; each weighed about 40 pounds and was capable of sustaining the equivalent of a 3-meter-drop onto concrete. Still in the developmental stage when they were first used in 2002, PackBots continued to be modified and improved based on feedback from soldiers: They were customized with modular payloads, cameras with night vision, and other features suited to specific missions. Greiner worked to win a $51.4 million development contract for small unmanned ground vehicles (SUGVs) from the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems program.

Defense contracts may have provided the means for iRobot to hire more engineers and move into a building, but the creation of a home-cleaning robot that the 1960s cartoon family the Jetsons might have owned drew the greatest attention. Greiner led the design team responsible for the Roomba, a small, relatively inexpensive, disc-shaped vacuum that cruises around a room, using sensors to maneuver around furniture and avoid stairs. It was introduced in 2002, and successive generations of the domestic robot following in 2004, 2007, and 2011. It received the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in 2003, and Oprah Winfrey declared it a “favorite thing” in 2011.

Greiner's efforts on the defense and domestic fronts significantly contributed to public acceptance of robots as an important emerging technology. When Greiner and her colleagues founded iRobot, the public viewed robotics—if they thought of the field at all—with skepticism or trepidation. The rare robots that existed outside the imagination of science fiction writers were to be found in university research laboratories or manufacturing facilities, primarily in the automobile industry, where they were used for spray-painting and welding. With their specialized applications and costs in the tens of thousands of dollars, robots were still more experimental than practical. However, as the industry matured, with iRobot leading the way, Greiner's conviction that everyday application and commercial success were attainable proved valid.

On October 22, 2008, Greiner announced her resignation as the chair of the iRobot board. CEO Angle replaced her, but Greiner continued to serve on the company's board of directors until 2011.

After leaving iRobot, Greiner founded the Droid Works (renamed CyPhyWorks) in 2009. In December of that year, the company received a $2.4 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology to work with researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop small, hovering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with video cameras and sensors. After Greiner left CyPhyWorks in 2017, the company was renamed Aria Insights; it ceased operations in March 2019.

In mid-2018, Greiner joined the US Army as a highly qualified expert for robotics, autonomous systems, and AI. As of 2023, Greiner was the CEO of Tertill, a gardening and weeding robotics company.

Personal Life

An introvert with a fear of public speaking and flying, Greiner learned to overcome her reserve and her fears when her position as the head of a global company routinely required her to speak to crowds that sometimes numbered in the thousands and to travel by plane on a weekly basis. A woman in a field dominated by men, she networked with generals and secured government contracts. In her leisure time, she enjoys kayaking, rock climbing, and paintballing, and her passion for snowboarding is second only to her passion for robotics.

Greiner was named one of America's Best Leaders by the Kennedy School at Harvard University in conjunction with U.S. News and World Report in 2005. She received the Pioneer Award from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International in 2006 and honorary doctorates from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and Clarkson University in 2009 and 2017, respectively. Greiner has been chair of the national Robotic Technology Consortium, the robotics advisory board of WPI, and the board of directors of the National Defense Industrial Association, as well as a trustee of MIT and the Museum of Science, Boston..

Bibliography

Greiner, Helen. “Manufacturing the Future: An Interview with Helen Greiner.” Interview by Deepa Kandaswamy. Women in Business 55.1 (2003): 35–37. Print.

Greiner, Helen. “Time for Robots to Get Real.” New Scientist 213.2848 (2012): 20. Print.

Headden, Susan. “The Lady and Her Robots.” U.S. News and World Report 139.23 (2005): 34–38. Print.

Howard, Courtney E. “iRobot Advances State of the Art in Military Robotics.” Military and Aerospace Electronics 19.5 (2008): 3. Print.

Hart, Jeff. "Tertill Is a Gardening and Weeding Robot from the Inventors of Rooma." Forbes, 14 Apr. 2021, www.forbes.com/sites/jeffkart/2021/04/14/tertill-is-a-gardening-and-weeding-robot-from-the-inventors-of-roomba/?sh=7a6c7363415b. Accessed 6 Mar. 2023.

Weir, Kirsten. “Robot Master.” Current Science 88.13 (2003): 8–9. Print.