Helen Greiner

Greiner was born in London on December 6, 1967. Her father came to England as a refugee from Hungary, and met his wife, Helen's mother, while he was attending Imperial College London. When Helen was five, her family moved to NYC and later Southampton, New York, US. Her father was a businessman and her mother was a nursery-school teacher. As a child, Greiner was interested in mathematics, science, and chess.

At the age of ten, Greiner went to see the popular film Star Wars. She has said she was inspired to work with robots by R2-D2 in the film.

Greiner graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, and earned her Master's in computer science in 1990. She studied at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and, while a student, worked on satellite projects at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

She also holds an honorary doctor of engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in 2009. Greiner has also received an honorary degree in 2017 from Clarkson University. Her long term goal is to understand the nature of intelligence.

iRobot

In 1990, along with Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle, Greiner co-founded iRobot, a robotics company headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, an artificial-intelligence and robotics platform business and undertook work involving space exploration, mine detection, bomb disposal, and search and rescue. She co-designed the first version of the iRobot Roomba.

Greiner served as President of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) until 2004 and Chairman until 2008. During her tenure, iRobot released the Roomba, the PackBot and SUGV military robots. She has been credited with establishing a culture of practical innovation that contributed to the deployment of more than 6,000 PackBots with United States forces, and with leading financing projects that raised $35 million in venture capital and culminated in a $75 million initial public offering. A 2012 published book chapter similarly credited Greiner with the military-market strategy and the financing figures, while reporting 4,000 deployed PackBots at that point.

PackBots were used for reconnaissance and bomb-disposal missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2005, the Associated Press reported that they had completed thousands of missions and that 150 were then deployed. The company went public in 2005.

She has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Greiner resigned as iRobot's chair in October 2008. Worcester Polytechnic Institute reported the following year that she had left to establish Cyphy Works, a venture focused on unmanned aerial vehicles.