iRobot Gets DARPA Award For LANdroids
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 4 of March , 2008 at 5:36 am
iRobot has announced that they’ve received funding from DARPA to design and construct a prototype LANdroid. We wrote about DARPA’s LANdroid solicitation over at OhGizmo last June; the idea is to create an army of small, mobile, autonomous, network routers to keep advancing troop connected in battlefield conditions. LANdroids are designed to be used primarily in urban environments which have all sorts of inconveniently placed buildings that block more conventional wireless access points. These little guys are actually disposable: the idea is that they get dropped by advancing troops, whereupon they wander around until they find the most effective place to act as a network node. The bots work together to cover “shadowed” and indoor areas, and if one of them gets blown up, the rest will move themselves to keep the network operational.
From iRobot’s press release:
iRobot will design and develop the LANdroids robot. This robot will be small enough that a single dismounted warfighter can carry multiple robots, inexpensive to the point of being disposable, robust enough to allow the warfighter to drop and throw them into position, and smart enough to autonomously detect and avoid obstacles while navigating in the urban environment.
The terms of the award include $1 million per year for up to three years for software development; after that, the next stage of the award will be designing the robot itself, followed by an evaluation period. There will be other players besides iRobot in the running, but I imagine that having so much PackBot experience probably gives iRobot a head start.
VIA [ Robot Stock News ]
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