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iRobot poised to unveil Warrior and SUGV military bots
iRobot is kind of a strange company. It seems like half the engineering team is hard at work on helpful little slavebots -- Roomba, Scooba, and the new Dirt Dog -- that aid common folk with their domestic chores, while the other half has seen Terminator one too many times and is all about building autonomous military vehicles that can be weaponized and transformed into killbots. Case in point is the new 250-pound Warrior (pictured above), formerly known as the NEOmover, which will officially be unveiled next week at the U.S. Army Annual Meeting & Exposition (it's like CES, except everyone is packing heat and telling glorified war stories). Initially Warrior -- along with another new bot, the 30-pound Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (or SUGV, pictured after the break) -- will be tasked with duties to similar to their predecessor, the PackBot: hauling around gear for troops, scouting out potentially dangerous locations, and sacrificing their young lives by literally jumping on the grenade (or land mine, or IED). However, Robot Stock News reports that iRobot Chairperson Helen Grenier has already discussed outfitting the mechanized fleet with guns and missiles, allowing them to mow down the enemy in between more humanitarian work like firefighting and battlefield extraction. Now we would never suggest that technology capable of keeping our soldiers out of harm's way should be discouraged, but we've seen Robocop one too many times and know what can happen when you strap heavy artillery onto an angry robot. Anyway, here's to hoping that by the time these bots get all decked out with machine guns and RPGs, the only enemy "troops" they'll ever face are the kind that South Korea is on the verge of deploying -- with robots fighting robots, everyone wins.[Via GoRobotics]
iRobot's Dirt Dog: Roomba gets a 'tude
So you've got Roomba on carpet duty and a couple Scoobas taking care of the kitchen and bathrooms, but who's cleaning up that mess of a workshop where you spend most of your time getting your hacks and mods on? Well up until now you had to rely on your own prowess with a shopvac (meaning that nothing ever actually got tidied up), but thanks to the good folks at iRobot, the bad-ass Dirt Dog is coming to get your back. The same size and shape as the more timid Roomba -- meaning all your current batteries, remotes, and charging bases are compatible -- Dirt Dog comes equipped with a 40% larger debris bin along with specially designed brushes to sweep up caked-on dirt, heavy debris, and other messes that are "too dirty for a regular vacuum." This new $130 dog will be taking a bite out of some of your toughest cleaning chores starting on Friday, but you gotta make sure that it doesn't wander out of your workspace and into the rest of the house -- it probably won't pee on your couch, but those 1,000 RPM brushes will shred your shag carpets, scratch the hell out of your polished hardwood, and -- if you have a significant other -- get you confined to the garage for the rest of your natural life.Update: So it looks like the vicious Dirt Dog isn't the only upcoming member of the iRobot family. A Cnet article tipped us off to a new military bot that the company is working on -- called the NEO Mover -- and a little digging around turned up a few solid deets. Touted as the PackBot's big brother, NEO is apparently a 200-pound robot that can haul cargo Big Dog-style, and interestingly enough, is also said to be able to "move like a soldier" -- not sure what that means, but we won't make any snarky comments for fear of a swift and deadly reprisal. Like PackBot, the NEO Mover will also serve as a demolition expert of sorts, detecting explosives and presumably sacrificing its own well-being so that its human overlords can remain safely packed into their Hummers.[Via The Raw Feed]
