



iRobot has built over 2,000 machines for the military. Most of ’em are 50 pounds plus, and more than three feet long. But, lately, the company has been working on an itty-bitty version of its Packbot reconnaissance machine — one that weighs less than a pound, and is about the size of a paperback book.

The idea is for a soldier to dispatch a swarm of these “Ember” bots to scout out a possibly-hostile building, instead of sending a single, large Packbot. Once inside, the Embers would set up an ad-hoc wireless network, and then autonomously scurry around the floor (kind of like iRobot’s Roomba vaccum cleaning automaton). Tiny flippers will help them vault over objects. Cameras will beam the scene back to the G.I.

Under a Darpa’s LANDroids program, iRobot has shown nine of the robo-critters networked together. The company is a year into a three year, $2.5 million deal to develop the Embers. Ultimately, the goal is make the little robots so easy to use and so cheap that they’re considered disposable. And that could change the way soldiers wage urban war.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. troops today employ thousands of robots. But they’re still considered specialized tools, used mostly to hunt for and get rid of improvised bombs. Make robots this small, and this user-friendly, however, and every infantryman will be able to carry ’em around. The soldiers will find all kinds of new ways to use their pocket-sized scouts – from tracking down insurgents to monitoring checkpoints to sneaking into militant hideouts. You can imagine the little robots everywhere.

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