People here might like to know that the Roomba is successful as a consumer product because the parts are so cheap. They are so cheap because they can fit a great deal of intelligence in a tiny kernel. They do this with a toy version of Lisp. By toy, I literally mean designed for toys. "My real baby".
It's actually a software problem -- and the numerous clones failed to figure that out.
My stock options are junk right now. It doesn't make sense though because they are pretty much the strongest mobile robot company in the world.
So medium term I wouldn't expect to make money off of IRBT. Long term, they should be positioned to take advantage of both the high and low end robotics markets. They aren't moving fast enough in certain areas -- and if Tipjoy does well, I'll take advantage of that.
The most interesting tech is definitely on the high end. The trend towards thousands of cores in a processor actually works really well with the kind of sensor processing and planning common in robotics. Particle filtering and large matrix/image operations can often be significantly parallelized. They're building a framework called Aware that is lots of C++ & Python to take advantage of such architectures.
http://www.irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=32
Ohh, and if you want to work for a robot company, but you're worried that you don't know enough about robotics: apply right now. You don't need to know robotics. Robotics is just a collection of different fields, with individuals doing their specialties. You should most especially apply if you know Lisp, because the Home Robots side needs you. http://irobot.com/sp.cfm?pageid=79
Ohh, I hear Anybots is hiring too, as is Willow Garage
The easiest by far would be to make or find a simulator. Dealing with a real robot is a pain in the ass. Gazebo is a good robot simulator -- part of this tookkit:
http://playerstage.sourceforge.net/gazebo/gazebo.html
It's free and good. I'm sure someone has made some hooks into it. Building those hooks would be a subset of building your own simulator.
It's actually a software problem -- and the numerous clones failed to figure that out.