iRobot: Good robot, bad robot

In the movie “I, Robot,” most of the androids in the Will Smith flick are good, serving their human masters even to the detriment of their own safety. But one robot develops a sense of self-preservation that worries Smith’s character, a cop who doesn’t trust the technological wonder to do no harm.

At the company iRobot Corp. (Nasdaq: IRBT) (which takes its name from the same Isaac Asimov book), an army of automated autonomous robots serves the military selflessly, to the point of letting themselves be blown up in order to prevent improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from doing the same to U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It’s the domestic robots that are not serving shareholders so well. The better-known consumer division at the Massachusetts company, which produces the Roomba robotic vacuum series, currently accounts for about 60% of the company’s revenues. The Roomba is a disc-shaped vacuum-cleaner robot on wheels that can slip under sofas while cleaning the floor.

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