iRobot, known for its Roomba vacuum cleaner, has filed two lawsuits against its smaller rival Robotic FX and its founder and president, Jameel Ahed, a former iRobot employee, alleging patent infringement and theft of trade secrets. The suit is regarding iRobots PackBot, a bomb-disposal robot extensively used in Afghanistan and Iraq. iRobot accuses Robotic FX of using proprietary PackBot technology to create a competing robot known as the Negotiator. The accusations are denied by Robotic FX, which says that the lawsuits are an effort to dissolve a competitor that iRobot now sees as threatening. The two companies competed in a U.S. Army program called xBot in August 2007, with the goal of securing a smaller, lighter type of bomb-detection robot than those presently utilized in Iraq. Surprisingly, the $279.9 million contract was awarded to the privately held, eight-employee Robotic FX over the 375-employee publicly traded company iRobot. In November 2007, however, iRobot was granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting Robotic FX from selling the Negotiator in its present design. The Army eventually decided to freeze the contract and reevaluate Robotic FXs ability to carry out the contract. An unnamed major defense company is supposedly interested in acquiring Robotic FX. The Army created the xBot program to address a pressing need of U.S. troops in Iraq. The currently used robots are too big, so a smaller, lighter robot would enable troops to inspect suspicious objects before calling the bomb squad, which could save many lives because improvised explosive devices (IEDs) account for nearly half of all coalition troop casualties in Iraq. iRobots patent-infringement suit focuses not only on the robots brains but also on its mobility capabilities. The iRobot v. Robotic FX case will likely be long, complex, and costly for both parties.