IRobot Rolls Out Pocket-Sized, One-Pound Machine, Ready to Swarm | Hacker News Reader

IRobot Rolls Out Pocket-Sized, One-Pound Machine, Ready to Swarm

wired.com

47 pointsnaish31 comments

I was at iRobot when this proposal was written. Very cool application for mesh networking.

Radio comms are so bad when deployed. This kind of ad hoc network builder is awesome.

That said, this is the first new robot that the Government & Industrial division has put out since I left. I really want to see a deployed Warrior (PackBot's big brother). iRobot is a perfect example of a company that seems to be suffering from inability to innovate as a public company. The talent is there though.

Do you know if it has only one motor?

As you can see from the video, it has flippers and wheel that power the treads. I don't know much about the internals.

Yeah, but I never saw the flippers running at the same time as the main treads, so it could be a possibility.

Is it just me or has the military been going through a complete revolution in the last decade?

Robotics, UAVs, etc. all take the human equation out of the surveillance and even the fighting. This is a completely radical departure from the past.

I just wonder where it will all lead.

These tiny robots don't have the radio capability to operate very far from a human.

...yet.

Actually their usage of ad-hoc networking means that you can easily use some robots (or simpler devices) as sort of 'radio-link-stations' to extend their range.

In fact that's the whole point of these bots in the first place!

Why it will lead to Judgement Day, of course!

Looks like a pretty robust platform. Nice and small, but still usable.

edit: And I wouldn't say that a lot of these technologies take the "human equation out", I would just say they take the actual human out. Most of the time, it's just a tool to aid the soldier. Humans still control most of the machines.

What happens when two enemy countries/entities have sufficiently advanced robotic troops to have robots fighting robots?

Like two robotic missiles that can attack the other country automatically? Like ICBMs? Or landmines?

Automated tools of warfare aren't new.

That this is brought up every fucking time a robot comes within a mile of the military is a really tired meme. Seriously. Go read every single issue of wired. I dare you to find a mention of robotics that doesn't bring up Terminator.

It's just lazy thinking.

Wow... didn't mean to set you off like that. Can you expound on why my comment is an example of lazy thinking?

Probably isn't about your comment specifically but about the robots -> all-robot war connection.

It was more the trend for discussions about robots in the military to degrade that annoyed me. This thread is going down that path.

You specifically were lazy in that we already have automated tools of killing each other and each others automated tools. It is heavy influence of hollywood that makes us think something without a human on board is fundamentaly different.

Robot armies fighting each other and super AI taking over military robots are two of the most common topics brought up in the context of military robots, and two of the least realistic or likely.

It's particularly irrelevant in a story about a mini robot used as a radio relay, 100% human controlled, with no weapons. This thing is a wi-fi repeater with a camera on top of an RC car.

You're not alone. The over-hyped "terminator case" is not only tiring, its also ridiculously unlikely and not even very scary. These are just wifi AP's on rc cars. With openWRT, and $40 at the Rat-Shak, you could make one too. And that's whats really scary. It only costs $40 now to make the land mines walk.

I'm much more concerned about suitcase nukes and a grad student that could make a super virus. I'll almost certainly die of the latter :(

While I don't disagree with you overall (i.e. that military robots are not necessarily Skynet), there is a fundamental difference between having military decisions, even at the tactical level, being made by machines vs. having them made by humans, at least until we have AGI (and possibly even afterwards).

One combatant will circumvent the weaponry in question, as has happened throughout our existence. Our capacity to kill each other is only outweighed by our capacity to survive.

Given how close we came to killing every human on the planet during the Cold War (and avoiding it through dumb luck), I'd have to say our capacity to kill each other far outweighs our capacity to survive.

I'd have to say our capacity to kill each other far outweighs our capacity to survive

Well, we're still here aren't we? Seriously though, when push came to shove (Cuban missile crisis was the closest) we (collectively) backed down. It seems nobody really wanted to fight when it meant certain death to themselves.

There have also been narrow misses that could have gone either way:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/coldwar/...

[TLDR version: Stanislav Petrov prevented nuclear war by correctly guessing that the nuclear launch his station detected was a false alarm, and not a true attack on the USSR. If he had decided the other way, nuclear war may have ensued.]

Sounds like war is about to get a lot more fun:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuB3PyjHQFE

http://www.battlebots.com/BattleBots.com/Home/Home.html

... for nations. But, one can only dream.

Read Rossum's Universal Robots -- the play wherein the term "robot" was coined, for one vision of this exact scenario.

It ain't you. Since the mid 90's especially, most modern armies have transformed into something that wouldn't have been imagined 20 years ago.

There is no intent to replace the human equation though. The human equation is what defines success or failure.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pw_singer_on_robots_of_wa...

Makes me want to round up a troop of roombas, add a little swarming code, and have a robotic peace march down to the capital.

"Make install, not war", as they say.

This looks very similar to the "Eye Drive"[1] mini robot developed by the Israelis, and already in use by the IDF (according to an article[2] in the Jerusalem Post). The company's promotional video[3] of the robot shows it in action.

[1] http://www.odfopt.com/eyedrive/Eye_Drive_home.htm [2] http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArti... [3] http://www.odfopt.com/Movies/eyedrive_new_movie.wmv

I just want to know how that thing got OVER the rail road track into the middle of the tracks.

Reminds me of the spiders from Minority Report.

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