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IROBOT CORP.

Address

8 Crosby Drive
Bedford, MA, 01730-1730
USA

UEI: N/A

Number of Employees: 455

HUBZone Owned: No

Woman Owned: No

Socially and Economically Disadvantaged: No

SBIR/STTR Involvement

Year of first award: 2001

Phase I Awards

Phase II Awards

57.89%

Conversion Rate

$1,789,618

Phase I Dollars

$8,502,332

Phase II Dollars

$10,291,950

Total Awarded

Awards

Up to 10 of the most recent awards are being displayed. To view all of this company's awards, visit the Award Data search page.

MAGMA Mission Planner: Multi-Autonomous Ground/Multi-Air Unmanned Vehicle Collaboration

Amount: $729,880 Topic: A07-032

The goal of MAGMA Phase II is to develop and demonstrate significant capabilities in UGV-UAV collaboration and sentry operations to support dangerous urban infantry missions, such as building clearing. To accomplish this goal effectively, the iRobot team will rely on established architectures and message sets developed under the Overseer and Collaborative Engagement projects, and continue system interoperability with ARDEC’s Multiple Platform Collaboration architecture. We will advance the collaborative capabilities developed under Collaborative Engagement to enable coordinated sentry and surveillance operations. The technical objectives of MAGMA Phase II incude applying collaborative engagement capabilities that PackBot and Raven systems to provide joint tasks in building surveillance, tracking and geo-locating of a dismounted target in an urban environment. Objectives also include designing and implementing algorithms for PackBots to detect persons entering or exiting a building, as well as designing and implementing an OCU display of geo-referenced UAV images via a map interface. We propose a PackBot-Raven team to conduct sentry operations, including building surveillance and stakeout at points of exit/entry. While the Raven sends back visual data to the operator, the PackBot will independently be processing its own visual data, using its onboard algorithms to help determine which data may be of interest, and it will send an alert message to the operator. Together, these two channels of information, made easily accessible on a single OCU, will allow operators to apply their military expertise to decide what subsequent human actions and robotic tasks may be necessary.

SBIR

Phase II

2009

DOD

ARMY

Peer-to-Peer Embedded Human Robot Interaction

Amount: $730,965 Topic: OSD06-UM5

During Phase I we were able to build a proof-of-concept robot system to validate and demonstrate our approach and underlying technology to design a robot system capable of natural human-robot interactions. Building upon these foundations, we have a solid technical foundation to meet our Phase II goal of developing a robust robot system capable of natural and seamless interaction with a range of persons, both previously known and unknown. The development of such a system will expand the use of robots to increasingly dynamic operations with both known and unknown people. To accomplish this objective, we will 1) develop an integrated robot solution, including robust mobility and sensing hardware, that is capable of interacting with a wide range people, 2) to enable this robot to communicate with a human operator using natural communication modalities including gesture recognition and speech recognition and synthesis, and 3) engage end-users throughout the project to solicit inputs for desired system design and to provide evaluations of the system usability once constructed.

SBIR

Phase II

2009

DOD

NAVY

Nostra: Power System Condition Monitoring and Prognostics

Amount: $769,708 Topic: A07-T013

The NOSTRA system monitors battery health by comparing observed voltage, current, and temperature data to models of both known healthy and known unhealthy battery packs. In Phase I of the NOSTRA program, we demonstrated that this model-based approach can generate accurate estimates of battery age. During Phase II, we will use this approach to estimate battery capacity and internal impedance, the key factors in determining battery health. We will also use a dynamic Bayes network to make inferences about future battery health, allowing users to ensure that a battery will support a given mission. Finally, we will deploy the NOSTRA system on two real robotic systems, the iRobot PackBot 510 and the iRobot Roomba 550, to demonstrate the systems ability to provide commercial value.

STTR

Phase II

2008

DOD

ARMY

Nostra: Power System Condition Monitoring and Prognostics

Amount: $769,708 Topic: A07-T013

STTR

Phase II

2008

DOD

ARMY

Tactical Teams: Cooperative Robot/Human Teams for Tactical Maneuvers

Amount: $736,221 Topic: SB062-009

The Tactical Teams project goal is to demonstrate the feasibility of a framework and relevant technologies to support robot and human teams in the collaborative performance of specialized tactical maneuvers. The Tactical Teams framework will facilitate human/robot teaming through the coordination of task roles; the use of natural communication modalities; including verbal and non-verbal avenues to allow effective communication between the human and robot members of the team; and the effective introduction to and demonstration of robots in key roles as part of tactically-relevant maneuvers.

SBIR

Phase II

2008

DOD

DARPA

DC-ATR: Distributed Co-operative ATR Using Low Resolution Mobile Sensors

Amount: $732,217 Topic: N07-T024

The iRobot team proposes to develop a deployable pedestrian detection module that will analyze a monocular video stream and identify all instances of visible pedestrians. To address the problem of pedestrian detection, we will employ data-driven approaches that help recognize specific appearance and motion patterns generated by moving humans. We will also develop detection algorithms that can leverage the decentralized use of multiple mobile sensor platforms and improve detection accuracy. To reduce false positives while also maintaining an acceptably high detection rate, we will explore mechanisms for exploiting scene context. We will also explore methods to obtain useful context. Our primary technical objectives in Phase II include developing a pedestrian detection algorithm that performs competitively with other published pedestrian detection algorithms; exploring mechanisms for integrating vehicle telemetry information and other contextual information with the detection results; evaluating the ability of our integrated detection solution to approach the detection performance of existing compute-intensive systems for pedestrian detection; operating the pedestrian detection algorithm onboard a tactical UGV platform without significant sensor or hardware modifications; and evaluating the pedestrian detection algorithm performance onboard a tactical UGV platform under urban outdoor conditions involving groups of five or more targets.

STTR

Phase II

2008

DOD

NAVY

Stingray II: Control of High Speed Unmanned Vehicles

Amount: $717,977 Topic: A07-210

For the Stingray Project, iRobot Corporation and Chatten Associates will develop techniques for teleoperation of small, high-speed UGVs. Currently deployed small UGVs are limited in the missions that they can perform, due to their slow speed and the limited situational awareness that they provide to their operators. We will address these limitations by combining semi-autonomous driver-assist behaviors with immersive telepresence. We will use the iRobot Warrior platform for the Stingray UGV, and we will modify this platform to travel at speeds up to 20 mph by replacing the treads with wheels and modifying the gearing for higher speeds. Driver-assist behaviors such as autonomous perimeter following, street following, and heading control will enable the operator to control small UGVs at much higher speeds than is currently feasible. The Chatten Head Aimed Remote Viewer (HARV) provides greatly increased situational awareness compared to fixed or joystick-aimed cameras, and we will extend these capabilities with panoramic and rear-view cameras. The combination of driver assist behaviors and immersive teleoperation will allow the Stingray UGV to perform reconnaissance and IED search missions at high speeds, with the vehicle under autonomous control, while the operator is free to focus full attention on the reconnaissance task.

SBIR

Phase II

2008

DOD

ARMY

Collaborative Engagement with Unmanned Systems

Amount: $729,247 Topic: A06-052

The asymmetric warfare common today requires engagement of small groups and even solitary combatants. Currently, each unmanned system used for surveillance requires a single operator, and, collaboration between operators must be moderated in a complicated fashion. This configuration is not an effective usage of manpower and hinders the efficiency necessary for time-critical geolocation of elusive targets. However, state of the art methods of multi-robot teaming have the potential to allow a single operator to control multiple unmanned systems, interacting with them at a high level. Such an approach will enable the unmanned systems to operate autonomously for extended periods, working collaboratively to pinpoint targets of interest. Our approach ties together three important multi-robot teaming components into a Collaborative Engagement system that can operate in the current architecture used by ARDEC. First, we will use a Mission Planner, developed under current ARDEC funding for the Overseer program to set up and manage mission threads. Second, we will use a formulation called Decentralized Data Fusion that enables an efficient and robust means of integrating data from multiple sources. Third, we will use a state of the art coordination scheme that allows each unmanned vehicle to operate in a distributed manner as it plays its role as a part of the team.

SBIR

Phase II

2008

DOD

ARMY

Peer-to-Peer Embedded Human Robot Interaction

Amount: $99,960 Topic: OSD06-UM5

iRobot Corporation and the Brown University Robotics Lab propose to develop a system allowing natural interactions between human operators and robots. The goal of the Natural Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) project is to utilize different verbal and non-verbal modes of communication between humans and robots, and ultimately demonstrate a more natural, less stressful, and more fully integrated method for control of robotics resources. During Phase I, we will 1) evaluate the use of gesture and speech recognition to provide the operator with an intuitive means of communicating to the robot, 2) evaluate the use of dialogue-based communication systems and humanlike gestures or character representations to provide the robot a naturally-understood way of communicating with the human operator, and 3) we will enlist the discussion and comments from end-user robot operators on our proposed HRI, including their usability and their utility for use in typical field operations.

SBIR

Phase I

2007

DOD

NAVY

MAGMA Mission Planner: Multi-Autonomous Ground/Multi-Air Unmanned Vehicle Collaboration

Amount: $119,970 Topic: A07-032

To conduct a target engagement, a team of autonomous unmanned air and ground vehicles will have to execute tasks of target pursuit and target tracking. The iRobot, CMU, and AeroVironment team is actively developing mission planning and collaborative teaming algorithms for a UAV-UGV team. For this project, we propose to expand the current team to double the number of participating UAVs and UGVs involved in a target engagement mission. Moreover, we aim to diversify the UGV set to include different but complementary UGV platforms that enable a wider range of capabilities for pursuit and tracking from the ground. The mission planning tools will be developed on a Supervisor Operator Control Unit to support mission monitoring, situational awareness and supervisory control for the operator. We lead the industry in our expertise of small UAV and UGV platforms as well as in advanced multi-robot coordination. The team has the collective knowledge and experience to develop practical near-term mission planning solutions and advanced collaborative UAV and UGV system teams.

SBIR

Phase I

2007

DOD

ARMY