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Helen Greiner: Cofounder of the iRobot Corporation, by Mary Schulte. 48 pgs. Farmington Hills, MI: KidHaven Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-0-4404-0

After her family moved to the United States from England, Helen Greiner became intrigued with robotic technology after seeing R2-D2 in Star Wars. The biography presents Greiner's girlhood encounter with the android as a seminal event in her life, in tandem with reading Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" from I, Robot. The same combination of the personal and the technological implied in Asimov's title recurred in the name of the commercial robotics enterprise Greiner and her colleagues began. Their company, iRobot, had a breakthrough successwith the Roomba, a self-propelled vacuum cleaner. The Roomba became the first robotic device to be embraced by consumers, thanks to its reasonable price point. Much of iRobot's work is concerned with industrial and military technologies, most notably the PackBot, used by the army in Afghanistan to search for mines and booby traps. The company is developing larger and more rugged robots, which could evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield. Greiner and her partners also developed a drilling robot that allowed millions of people to watch around the world as National Geographic Channel and Fox television peaked inside an Egyptian pyramid that had been sealed for 4500 years.

The fourth and final chapter is devoted to encouraging young women to pursue technology; Greiner relates her own experience hacking computers in junior high before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked in the university's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Greiner continues to push for ways technological interventions may help people avoid "dirty, boring and difficult jobs" (p. 8). The human-oriented model of engineering Greiner represents will engage boys and girls alike.