LANdroids offer autonomous radio relay on the battlefield

DARPA's proposed LANdroids won't be the first installation to offer up expendable data gathering pawns on the battlefield, but these "intelligent, autonomous radio relay nodes" could be used to "establish and manage mesh networks in urban settings." Essentially, these critters would be cheaply produced and handed out en masse for warfighters to drop at random in order to create temporary and continually evolving network infrastructures that could lead to better communication over various occupied regions. It even sounds like these creatures will sport self-healing design cues, and while we're not sure if they'll be immune to imminent EMP blasts, we can already envision bored soldiers futilely hooking these things up to their PSPs and searching for an open game room. [Warning: PDF read link]

[Via El Reg]

[drtekger @ Jun 14th 2007 12:00AM]

Foxhole 1 this is Foxhole 2, better open a CTF game now or I will bust yo ass.

[Anuj @ Jun 14th 2007 12:57AM]

Utterly useless why can you piggy back these systems on the existing packbots or other robots that way you save money and the robots become more efficient too at the same time

[zuricher @ Jun 14th 2007 1:56AM]

yeah they could mount it on a LANdrover instead

[Stewart @ Jun 14th 2007 8:07AM]

Very cool, a few thousand drop around campus. Like ants you can not kill them all. Bring them on!!

Self-Configuration, Tethering, Intelligent Relaying, Self-Healing, Self-Optimizing, Intelligent Power Management, totally mobile totally dynamitic.

It is like a moblie grid computer network. :)

[the_third_kind @ Jun 14th 2007 11:43AM]

@zuricher

hahahaha... "LANdrover".... nice one...