SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Engineers can reshape the manufacturing and health-care sectors if they develop robots with better navigation, recognition and manual dexterity, according to a leading robotics researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Researcher Rodney Brooks laid out his vision for the future of robotics in a keynote address as his company, iRobot Corp., announced it has sold 1 million of its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners.

Robots with the object recognition of a two-year-old, the dexterity of a six-year-old and the ability to move about in human work spaces could radically alter the labor market, the need to outsource manufacturing and health care for the elderly, said Brooks at the RoboNexus conference here.

"I believe we can create an economic tsunami that would rival what happened with semiconductors and computers in Silicon Valley," he said.

Just having the dexterity of tying shoes or handling force insertion would open many new applications, Brooks said. That requires robot hands with multiple degrees of freedom, sensors for touch, moisture and temperature and the grace to handle objects ranging from an ounce to twenty pounds.

"A dog has better manual dexterity with his teeth and paws that the robots in the labs today," he said.

Researchers have made enormous advances in computer vision, but to commercialize them "the challenge is to get that to work on a $3 DSP and a $2 camera," he said.

In addition, robots still lack human vision capabilities such as compensating for shadows or recognizing a face despite changes over time. "If we build robots for elder care, it would be nice if they could tell old people from young people," he quipped.

Although robotic navigation has largely been solved, there is still no low-cost way for robots to build internal maps of their environments to help them move more freely, Brooks said.

"You can do it in the lab, but the price is too high to do it in the home. A lot of people use laser-based subsystems that cost a few thousand dollars, but there has to be a lower-cost solution if robots are going to build navigation maps of users' homes," he said.

For its part, iRobot is exploring scanning sonar as a lower cost method to let robots build internal maps. Other possible solutions include using RFID tags in the home to navigate or using location capabilities available on a home network.

"A lot of robotics companies are eager to see how home networking standards play out and whether there will be location-based information they can leverage. But the robotics companies are not big enough to force anyone to build localization capabilities into the home networks," he said.

While commercial robots still have many hurdles to climb, they have made some significant advances. For example, iRobot (Burlington, Mass.) announced at the conference it has sold 1 million of its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners since 2002.

"This is a huge milestone for our industry," said Helen Greiner, chairwoman of iRobot. "We are at the cusp of a whole new industry and there is room for many new business models. We need more successes," she added.

The 14-year-old company saw its annual revenues surge four-fold in 2003 thanks in large part to the Roomba, which ranges in price from $199 to $249. The company plans to roll out a line of single-function consumer robots soon.

"I am not just a vacuum cleaners salesperson," Greiner quipped.

Military markets are growing even faster. Greiner said iRobot has landed a $40 million contract as part of the U.S. Army's Future Vehicles program. The company's PackBot robots now support more than 100 missions a day in Iraq, she added.