PackBot

What it is

PackBot is a tactical mobile robot developed by iRobot. "Tactical mobile robot" is a general label for a machine that can be brought to a site and sent into places that are dangerous or hard to reach for people; in PackBot's documented record that meant search work after a disaster and deployment with the US military ^[1].

iRobot, the company behind it, was founded in 1990 by three MIT roboticists: Colin Angle, Helen Greiner and Rodney Brooks ^[1].

Where it came from

PackBot was not iRobot's first robot. Earlier machines from the company include Genghis, designed in 1991 for space exploration, and Ariel, built in 1996 to detect and clear mines in the surf zone ^[1]. The business in those years was spread across several industries: when it launched the Roomba home robot in 2002, iRobot said it had spent the previous 12 years building products for the US military, law enforcement, energy, industrial cleaning and toy industries ^[2].

PackBot's own starting point was a contract awarded in 1998 by DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to develop tactical mobile robots ^[1]. A research contract of this kind generally pays a company to turn an idea into working hardware; in this case the result became a machine the military went on to deploy.

What it was used for

Where a specification sheet would list sensors or weight, iRobot's record lists uses. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, PackBot carried out search operations at the World Trade Center in New York ^[1]. In 2002 the US military deployed PackBot for the first time ^[1]. In 2004 iRobot won a contract to develop a Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle for the US Army's Future Combat Systems programme ^[1] — the same line of work, carried from a research contract into an Army programme.

Taken together, these events describe a machine built under a defence research contract, then sent to two kinds of scene: the wreckage of a major attack, and military deployment.

Where it sits in the story

2002 was the year iRobot moved in two directions at once. PackBot was deployed by the US military for the first time, and the Roomba home robot went on sale in the same year ^[1]. Also in 2002, iRobot worked with the National Geographic Society on a robot that explored the Great Pyramid in Egypt ^[1].

The sequence from Genghis and Ariel — one-off research machines built for space exploration and for mine clearance — to PackBot, which did search work at the World Trade Center and was deployed by the army, marks a change in what these machines were for. PackBot sits in the middle of that line: it continues iRobot's earlier military and specialised work, and it shows such a robot moving from research prototype to equipment that could actually be called out to a site. The fact that Roomba shipped in the same year as PackBot's first deployment shows the same company pushing robots toward two very different users: professionals working in dangerous places, and ordinary households ^[1].