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Field testing for products made by the iRobot Corp. takes place in settings both exotic and mundane.

"When you put robots into situations where there haven't been robots before," said Greiner, the company's president, "you very quickly find out whether they're up to the job, and what design changes you might need to make."

Greiner and co-founders Colin Angle and Rodney Brooks, who met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have spent 12 years introducing their robot prototypes into new environments and then working to make them better.

Greiner envisions a world in which robots handle tasks that are too difficult, dangerous or time-consuming for humans.

She describes iRobot's goal as "doing for robots what Apple did for computers, making them available to anyone who wants to use one."

iRobot is perhaps the only company in the world that develops and sells robots to the military, researchers, large corporations and consumers. Most robotics makers focus on just one segment.

Four of its rugged PackBots were shipped to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to help soldiers clear caves and compounds that had been occupied by the Taliban; one of them discovered a buried anti- personnel mine.

A custom-built robot called the Pyramid Rover starred in a National Geographic program called "Pyramids Live: Secret Chambers Revealed," poking its fiber-optic camera into long-forgotten spaces.

Retailers report that the company's Roomba Intelligent FloorVac, the autonomous cleaning machine that was put through its paces beneath Greiner's bed, sold briskly during the holiday shopping season.

But as iRobot has tried to nudge robots out of the domain of tech- savvy hobbyists and into the mainstream, it has occasionally struggled as a business.

Developing first-of-a-kind robots is expensive, and the executives at iRobot have long sought to put one of their inventions into profitable high-volume production.

"When we left MIT, we wanted to create robotic products that would touch people's lives on a daily basis," Angle said.

The robots rely on human guidance by remote control, as the PackBot does, or have a low-level ability to respond to stimuli in their environment, as the Roomba does when its downward-facing infrared sensor notices a staircase and signals the device to steer away from it.

When the company was founded in 1990, "we didn't know what we were doing," said Brooks, who serves as iRobot's chairman and as co- director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

The company's early revenue came from research contracts with government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Pentagon.

More recently, iRobot began developing products with commercial partners, such as a doll designed with Hasbro called My Real Baby that was able to convey through sounds and facial expressions whether its owner was providing adequate care.

The company also has financed some projects on its own, such as the Roomba, a $200 device that got its name from the dancelike circular movements it makes as it cleans. Since September, Angle has marketed the Roomba through a 30-minute infomercial and a spot on the Home Shopping Network (285 Roombas were sold in 15 minutes), and it has received generally positive reviews.