engineering

Helen Greiner

Helen Greiner is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Helen Greiner rather than just read about it. In short: Helen Greiner (born December 6, 1967) is an American engineer and businesswoman who was a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets, and of Tertill Corporation. Greiner was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for leadership in the design, development, and applicatio…

Key takeaways

Helen Greiner belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Helen Greiner to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Helen Greiner from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Helen Greiner (born December 6, 1967) is an American engineer and businesswoman who was a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets, and of Tertill Corporation. Greiner was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 for leadership in the design, development, and application of practical robots.

Early life and education 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 Southampton, New York, US. 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. She also holds an honorary doctor of engineering degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Greiner has also received an honorary degree from Clarkson University. Her long term goal is to understand the nature of intelligence.

Career In 1990, along with Rodney Brooks and Colin Angle, Greiner co-founded iRobot, a robotics company headquartered in Bedford, Massachusetts, which delivers robots into the consumer market. 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 built a culture of practical innovation and delivery that led to the deployment of 6,000 PackBots with the United States armed forces. In addition, Greiner headed up iRobot's financing projects, raising $35M in venture capital for a $75M initial public offering. She has worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In 2008, Greiner founded CyPhy Works, creator of the Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications (PARC) and Pocket Flyer multi-rotor drones. She also served on the board of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF). She left the company in late 2017, and subsequently resigned from her position on the board of directors to support a broader mission within the US Army. As of 2018, she works as an advisor to the United States Army, within the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, (OASA(ALT)). She was sworn in on June 4, 2018 as a Highly Qualified Expert (HQE) for Robotics, Autonomous Systems & AI for the Army (ASA(ALT)). In September 2020, Greiner was appointed as CEO and Chairman of robotic gardening startup, Tertill.

Awards and recognition Greiner was listed as one of the Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2000. In 2003, Greiner and iRobot co-founder Colin Angle were named Ernst and Young New England Entrepreneurs of the Year. That same year, Greiner was named one of the “Top Ten Innovators” by Fortune Magazine. Good Housekeeping named her "Entrepreneur of the Year" by and she was named by the Kennedy School at Harvard in conjunction with the U.S. News & World Report as one of "America's Best Leaders." Greiner received the Pioneer Award from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International(AUVSI) in 2006. In 2007, Greiner was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. She received the 2008 Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Innovation for her work at iRobot. She has also been honored as one of Technology Review Magazine's TR100 "Innovators for the Next Century." Greiner spoke at TEDxBoston in 2013, discussing how robots can save lives, performing work that is either too monotonous or dangerous for humans. She received the DEMO God Award at the DEMO Conference in 2014. Following this achievement, she was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Leadership (PAGE) by US President, Barack Obama and US Secretary of Commerce, Penny Pritzker. In 2018, she was named "woman of the year" at Wentworth Institute of Technology. Greiner will be one of several speakers at GoFly's 2020 Final Fly Off. Notably, she will be the only female speaker attendee. This competition, in Mountain View, California, will feature teams from around the world to compete for almost $2 Million in prizes.

References

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Helen Greiner

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Helen Greiner claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Helen Greiner before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Helen Greiner ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Helen Greiner

In research: Helen Greiner appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Helen Greiner in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Helen Greiner is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1967 births, 20th-century American businesspeople, 20th-century American businesswomen, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Helen Greiner outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Helen Greiner in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Helen Greiner means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Helen Greiner out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Helen Greiner in simple terms?

Why does Helen Greiner matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Helen Greiner?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Helen Greiner.