Ever since Rosey the Robot took care of "The Jetsons" in the early 1960s, the promise of robots making everyday life easier has been a bit of a tease.
Rosey, a metallic maid with a frilly apron, "kind of set expectations that robots were the future," said Colin M Angle, the chief executive of the iRobot Corporation. "Then, 50 years passed."
Now Angle's company is trying to do Rosey one better — with Ava, a 5-foot-4 assistant with an iPad or an Android tablet for a brain and Xbox motion sensors to help her get around. But no apron, so far.
Over the last decade, iRobot, based outside Boston, has emerged as one of the nation's top robot makers. It has sold millions of disc-shaped Roomba vacuum cleaners, and its bomb disposal robots have protected soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, with Ava, it is using video and computing advances to create robots that can do office work remotely and perhaps one day handle more of the household chores.
In late January, iRobot expanded a partnership with InTouch Health, a small company that enables doctors at computer screens to treat stroke victims and other patients from afar. And this week, Texas Instruments said it would supply iRobot with powerful new processors that could help the robots be more interactive and gradually lower their cost.
"We have a firm belief that the robotics market is on the cusp of exploding," said Remi El-Ouazzane, vice president and general manager of the Texas Instruments unit that makes the processors.
Mr. Angle's hopes for broadening the industry's appeal are shared by other robot companies, which have struggled to expand beyond industrial and military uses, toys and other niche products.
Programming robots to mimic human behavior remains difficult. But the ability to use the tablets as simple touch-screen controllers is attracting more software developers, who are envisioning applications that could enhance videoconferencing, provide mobile security guards and sales clerks and help the elderly live longer in their homes.
And with their own innovations now at the center of the effort, the technology giants - Apple, Google, Microsoft and the semiconductor companies - are also pushing things along.
Mr. Angle, 44, who has been at the forefront of robotics since he was a student at M.I.T., said Ava "is one of the things in our pipeline that I am personally most excited about." But he cautioned that the robot was still a prototype and would not report for any actual work duties before next year.
Mr. Angle estimates that the early versions of Ava will cost in the tens of thousands of dollars, high enough that the company is focusing first on medical applications with InTouch Health, based in Santa Barbara, Calif.
InTouch already has robots with video hookups in many smaller hospitals, and they have saved lives in emergencies when specialists could not get there in person. But the doctors have to drive and manipulate the robots with joysticks to see the patients.
Mr. Angle said that a tap on Ava's tablet screen could dispatch it to the right room and free doctors from the more mundane controls. Its mapping system, based partly on Microsoft's 3-D motion sensor for the Xbox, could enable the robot to hustle to the patient's bedside without slamming into obstacles.
As time goes on, Mr. Angle says he thinks that businessmen could use the robots as proxies at meetings, speaking and watching wirelessly through Ava's headgear and even guiding her into the hall for private chats. And if the sticker price eventually gets down to consumer levels, as he thinks it will, Ava could, with arms added, dispense pills to baby boomers or even fetch them cocktails.
Still, given how long other robotic breakthroughs have taken, Wall Street is not sure what to make of all this yet.
As sales of its vacuums and military robots grew, iRobot's earnings shot up to $40 million last year from $756,000 in 2008, and its stock surged to $38 a share from $7. But with pressure mounting for budget cuts at the Pentagon, Mr. Angle told analysts last month that the company's military sales could drop by as much as 20 percent this year, and the stock quickly tumbled to $25 to $26 a share.
The company had laid off 55 of the 657 employees it had last fall in anticipation of a slowdown in military sales in the United States, and the head of that division departed last month amid concerns that iRobot had not picked up enough military sales to foreign governments.
Frank Tobe, an independent analyst who publishes the Robot Report online, said that until Ava was equipped to pick up and handle objects, the robot would have limited uses. But he said the partnership with InTouch gave iRobot a much-needed toehold in health care. iRobot plans to invest $6 million in InTouch, and Mr. Tobe said by combining their technologies, the companies could produce devices at a much lower cost and attract more business.
IRobot also faces growing competition from robotics companies in Asia and Europe, many subsidized by governments that believe the innovations will help push their economies forward.
But analysts say iRobot has a number of crucial patents. And the company has a strong track record in finding practical uses for robots and getting them to market.
©2012 The New York Times News Service