Whoops, I Stepped on the LANdroid

By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews

I wonder how much time the U.S. military spends on these cute acronyms and names (remember the B.E.A.R. - Battlefield Extraction Assist Robot I posted about a few days ago?). At any rate, the LANdroid is designed to be a disposable, autonomous robot that is dropped onto an urban battlefield. The LANdroids will roam until find the best location to maximize coverage, and if one is destroyed, the rest will move to reconfigure coverage.

The details are trickier than it might seem… For example, the bots will be powered by disposable batteries, so power management will definitely be an issue, especially in a package that can’t be heavier than 1 kilo or larger in volume than 1 liter. The final product should only cost $100 per bot at small production volumes (i.e. 1000 units). This concept is a public solicitation by DARPA, which means that they don’t have one of these yet, but they really want one (and so do I). Source: OhGizmo!

We Say: I’m not a fan of our disposable society already, especially with all our massive amounts of e-waste already. Still, can’t deny military HW of this sort needs to be disposable …