Why Did iRobot Lose the Contract?

One word: Price. iRobot last year made a decision to improve its PackBot design to make it stronger and faster, so to continue justifying its high price, instead of cheaper. Hence, the PackBot 510. The PackBot 510 EOD, I presume, was the robot in the running for this contract, not the older PackBot EOD. But this was a contract awarded not on the best deal for the money, or the robots most likely to save lives, but the cheapest robot that met the specs. Even if the PackBot 510 is vastly superior to the Negotiator (and who of us can say? iRobot contends it is better, but that's all we know), the military made it clear they wanted cheaper robots, and that's what they are going to get. In retrospect, maybe iRobot should have designed a PackBot 100, an el cheapo version for $80K to undercut competitors. Sort of like the Roomba 400.

That being said, this contract would not have been awarded if the military didn't want the Negotiator. If they thought it had flaws that were serious, they could have changed the competition to rig the results. Note that they did change the competition specs and rerun part of the competition once. They want the Negotiator, and iRobot has to figure out a way to live with it, or get a judge to throw out a huge, urgent military contract for soldiers in Iraq over a patent dispute. UGLY.

The only saving grace I see is that iRobot still has its own IDIQ contracts and could still get orders, BUT, why? In fact, the whole rationale for the whole contest this summer suggests that the military wanted to save money on its robots, because otherwise it could have simply used its existing PackBot IDIQ contracts and bought hundreds of PackBots.

There are still pockets of good news -- the Roomba 500 Series is selling well and is a high-margin product -- the new Connectr robot seems to have some potential and there's always the, er, Looj.