The next generation of military robot won’t be gun-toting, armored, or equipped with explosives. Instead, it will be soft. So says iRobot about the next custom robot it will be engineering for the U.S. military.
The company announced Tuesday that it had received a multi-year, $3.3 million contract for the mobile robots from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Army Research Office. Their mission: build a so-called ChemBot that can worm its way through the most cluttered and complex environments, and through openings that are smaller than it is.
