Consumer robotics pioneer Colin Angle envisions a day when robots will fold your laundry, take your blood pressure and keep soldiers from walking into dangerous situations.

His company, iRobot, produces the Roomba vacuum, as well as Scooba for mopping, Dirt Dog for cleaning workshop floors and PackBot for military jobs. Angle, 39, says the need for robots doesn't stop in the home and on the battlefield.

"Over the next 10 years, we're going to see a proliferation of practical devices that ... change the way we live our lives," he said.

His master's thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology introduced "Genghis," a six-legged walking robot that was later installed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and his team designed the rovers for NASA that led to the Sojourner exploring Mars in 1997.

He will speak Wednesday in Raleigh, but first, he chatted with staff writer Anne Krishnan. An edited transcript follows.

Q: You've got Roomba, Scooba, Dirt Dog and PackBots. Where else is iRobot headed with its technology?

A: We're going to see the mission of robots in the military expand. If you can imagine the challenge of a soldier trying to clear a building like we did in Fallujah, there's a huge challenge.

A robot could go in the door, and if the robot was shot at, then you pretty much know what's going on in the room. If the robot's not shot at, the robot can send back images and situational awareness-type information back to squad leaders so they can plan the next move.

We're also creating a robot that, instead of being carried to where they want to be by a soldier, they are large enough and capable enough to be soldiers themselves. We're also working in partnership with John Deere on a robot called the R-Gator. It's a utility vehicle. You drive it from Point A to Point B. You get out, push a button and it retraces its steps, avoiding obstacles that may have come into the path, and can carry over 1,500 pounds of payload.

Q: How about for the home?

A: The big picture is we want to make routine housework and maintenance a choice. Lawn mowing, window washing, sweeping, food preparation, bathroom cleaning, folding your laundry and so forth are applications that we're very interested in pursuing. Lawn mowing certainly is one of those that I think is more feasible than laundry-folding robots, although that's the one I want the most.

By doing this, not only do we make life a little more livable, give people more time to do other things, but we allow our aging demographics to live independently in their homes for longer periods of time. And that's a profoundly important mission for us to be working upon. Then you start creating technology that will allow medical care to be provided without having to require the person to go to the hospital for routine checkups and that sort of thing.

Q: What kind of competition is there in home robotics?

A: Roomba has nearly all of the market share in the home robot vacuum-cleaning space. Electrolux has a product called the Trilobite out there, which is priced around $1,500. There's been a number of robots that have come in and out of the market. We've been very aggressive, both in price and performance, and thus far that has resulted in not a lot of real competition because we set the bar so high. This is a really hard area to break into. There's a lot of technology, a lot of [intellectual property].

IRobot going public actually had an interesting impact. The venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who had shied away from the robot space because it was so hard and so expensive and there were not any examples of anyone who had successfully done it, suddenly had us as an exemplar.

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