Some people have devoted their lives to developing robots, such as Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, who founded iRobot with their academic adviser, Rodney Brooks.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Rodney Brooks, Rethink Robotics founder and former director of the MIT Computer and Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said he hoped Baxter represented a "new concept in manufacturing".

BBC: Baxter the robot

Founded in 1990 by Angle, fellow MIT grad Helen Greiner and MIT professor Rodney Brooks, the company was initially more of a nerd dream than a workable business plan.

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With his close friend since freshman year, MIT ice hockey player Helen Greiner, and their professor, Rodney Brooks, Angle formed Irobot in 1990, naming it in homage to the 1950 novel by Isaac Asimov.

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Some people have devoted their lives to developing robots, such as Colin Angle and Helen Greiner, who founded iRobot (nasdaq: IRBT - news - people ) with their academic adviser, Rodney Brooks.

FORBES: The Robots Are Coming!

The present generation of factory robots is akin to early mainframe computers in offices, reckons Rodney Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot, an American firm whose products include the Roomba, a robotic vacuum-cleaner, as well as military robots.

ECONOMIST: Automation

Rodney Brooks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nudged the whole field forward in early 1990s when he showed how robots could make faster decisions by responding to sensory data from their immediate environment rather than relying on complex sets of rules.

FORBES: The Robots Are Coming!