The Roomba cleaning bot has made iRobot a household name, but vacuuming hockey pucks aren't the only thing the company builds. The firm made a splash a year ago when it unveiled its 110 Firstlook throwable robot, whose small size and dual tracks made it ideal for the military. Now the 110 has an even cooler trick up its sleeve: It's been outfitted with a grabber arm that can help defuse bombs.
The 110's original selling point was its ability to transmit photos or videos back to users. The bot was small and durable enough to be tossed through a window—iRobot says it can survive a 16 foot drop—and manipulated from afar, a big plus for soldiers that, say, need to clear a building safely.Now iRobot has added new capabilities to the platform, including a thermal imager, chemical sensor, and that all-important manipulator arm. It's a pretty straightforward design, but has the capability to grab objects or snip wires. But for a soldier concerned about an object covered by a blanket—such as the very suspicious phone in iRobot's demo video—the bot offers the ability to poke about from a safe distance.It's not the company's only foray into bots that can handle danger. At the height of the Fukushima cleanup effort, a pair of iRobot "packbots" investigated the shuttered nuclear plant to find the scope of the disaster and measure radiation levels. Nor is the 110 the only throwable robot in the game. One design I particularly like is the Scout XT, which resembles a small dumbbell. The lightweight design and ability to get a camera into difficult places convinced the US military to order hundreds of that model alone.If you're sensing a military theme here, you'd be right. (I have to ask because, according to a poll earlier this year, Most Americans don't think robots fight in the military.) Drones get most of the attention, but the military is driving the push to roboticize everything, including horse-beasts. It's getting to the point where some soldiers may be getting emotionally attached to their hard-working, digital friends. Others are asking when we're going to prevent autonomous robots from doing, you know, killing on their own. Good news! The campaign to stop that isn't going very well.@derektmead