iRobot brings robotic WLAN to urban battlefield
Everything you want a robot to be: Portable, small, inexpensive, intelligent, and robust; iRobot will develop robots to serve as relay node for urban battle-field WLAN
The LANdroids are coming, the LANdroids are coming. iRobot Corp. (NASDAQ: IRBT) has received an award under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) LANdroids program. This multiyear robotics research and development program calls for iRobot to develop a new portable communications relay robot which is small, inexpensive, intelligent, and robust. The goal of the DARPA LANdroids program is to develop technologies to enable soldiers operating in dense urban environments rapidly to deploy and maintain a vital communications infrastructure. This infrastructure is composed of a system of multiple LANdroids mobile communications relay robots which form a reconfigurable communications backbone in support of operations.
The robot will be small enough that a single dismounted soldier can carry multiple robots, inexpensive to the point of being disposable, robust enough to allow the soldier to drop and throw them into position, and smart enough autonomously to detect and avoid obstacles while navigating in the urban environment. DARPA is the central R&D organization for the Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated to sponsoring revolutionary, high-payoff research and development that maintains the technological superiority of the U.S. military.
