Five years ago, troops in Iraq were lucky if they had a bomb-stopping jammer in their Humvee. Now, one company wants to outfit robots with the electronic countermeasures, to keep the machines safe from remotely-detonated explosives. But you've got to wonder whether outfitting the 'bots with another $100,000 in classified tech kind of undermines the purpose of having a disposable army of machines to handle irregular war's most dangerous work.

Qinetiq North America, makers of the Talon bomb-disposal robot, floated the concept at conference in Denver, Danger Room co-founder Sharon Weinberger reports. The idea would be to strap a Thor portable jammer (.pdf) onto the 125-pound, three-foot tall robot.

Over 2,800 of the remote-controlled machines have been deployed to warzones around the world, picking up (and blowing up) improvised explosives, so the flesh-and-blood bomb squad can stay safely far away. In the process, thousands of Qinetiq's and rival iRobot's machines have been wounded in action – or destroyed entirely. In Iraq, the robots' sacrifices became so well-known that the insurgents started target the machines, in order to draw out their human operators. (In Baghdad, for instance, I saw one 'bot narrowly escape a pair of rocket-propelled grenades.)

So there's a logic to protecting these robots, by giving them the safety of a radio-frequency jammer. The $108,000 devices interrupt the signals that insurgents use to set off the bombs from afar.

But one of the major reasons robots are used to handle this kind of hazardous work is because they are relatively inexpensive at $100,000 or so and relatively easy to repair. Plus, they don't carry all kinds of classified technologies that could help out an enemy. So commanders are more or less free to unleash them at will. Start loading a Talon or a Packbot with such equipment, and that equation could change.

You already see the shift with military robots in the sky. Last year, I was with a marine patrol that spent a couple of hours hunting for a missing drone in Helmand Province. The troops exposed themselves to fire in order to find their robot. Which sort of defeats the purpose of having a robot, in the first place.

But the chances of the jammers-on-bots is fairly low, at least in the short term. Qinetiq has tried to trick its Talons out before – with everything from machine guns to grenade launchers. None of those models ever made it into battle.

Update: Okay, this makes more sense. "The purpose of the robot carrying the jammer is to protect soldiers in bomb suits when they walk down-range to verify that the robot had already destroyed all the IED's," Qinetiq's Bob Quinn tells Danger Room in an e-mail.

*"Often it's the well hidden secondary device that is most deadly to trained counter-IED soldiers. A soldier in a bomb suit can't carry a 70 lbs Thor jammer on his back *[the portable ones are more like 15 pounds, but point taken – ed.] but the TALON robot can do so easily while providing video and audio overwatch. This device also alerts the security detail protecting the EOD soldiers that someone is trying to set off the IED. So, the security team can try to find the bad guy in real time. Our problem was to find a way to operate the jammer without loosing radio control of the TALON. So, its about protecting our soldiers not the robot.

I'm still not 100% sure I buy it. But it's a far better application than trying to bomb-proof the 'bot.

Photo: DoD

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