U.S. Army Wants More Robots

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19, 2013

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

This undated photo released by Tokyo Electric Power Co. Monday, April 18, 2011 shows a Packbot, made by Bedford, Massachusetts company iRobot. Readings Monday from a Packbot that entered two crippled buildings of Unit 1 and Unit 3 at the tsunami-flooded Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Sunday for the first time in more than a month displayed a harsh environment still too radioactive for workers to enter. (AP)

The U.S. Army this week agreed to an $11 million contract with iRobot to purchase 70 of its new, smaller backpack bots used by soldiers around the globe. The company says it has sold more than 4,000 of its robots world wide.

Robots have been a recurring topic for On Point shows:

Author P. W. Singer, one of the country’s authorities on battlefield robotics, joined us to talk about the future of remote controlled war last year.

iRobot CEO and co-founder Colin Angle joined us in 2009, for a show about robots.

And in 2004, we took a look at the human-robot relationship.

Doverbros

iRobot is using a frequency to run the robots that belongs to another service. Normal activity could cause the robots to fail
Wm. James from Missouri

Delay that order, Soldier !
No

Funny… iRobot just today announced plans for 44 Massachusetts layoffs in their defense division… anticipating lower spending from the military.
Stop the Wars

More money for obsolete garbage military hardware. A trillion spent in unnecessary wars and no money for health care or education. Students graduating with the burden of massive loans and debt that takes them 20 years to repay. Obscene. Tell your politicians to reexamine American foreign policy objectively. You’ll see it’s quite convoluted which leads us into these absurd conficts. War in Iraq was criminal. You’re telling me it couldn’t have been resolved diplomatically and that a nation of 25 million people was a threat to us or that the threat from terrorists operating out of Afghanisatan could not have been handled through covert means?

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