Government & Industrial \ Research \ Advanced Platforms — LANdroids Robot

research - Advanced Platforms LANdroids Robot

The Need:

Rapidly establishing a reliable communications network in an area with no existing fixed infrastructure is a major difficulty for warfighters in hostile urban environments. Communications problems, including a lack of line-of-sight between communication nodes, multipath and fading effects and other complexities, hinder signal propagation and make the deployment of static communication relay nodes unreliable and unfeasible. Employing networked mobile communications nodes that can each optimize their local positioning will improve global network connectivity and reliability, providing warfighters with a more effective and responsive communications network on demand.

The Project:

The LANdroids robot project is developing a LANdroid mobile communications relay node. The LANdroids robot will be small, intelligent and inexpensive, leveraging recent advances in consumer electronics and mobile robotics to drive down costs and harness the exponential growth of capabilities derived from continuous market pressures. LANdroids robot will be about the same size and mass as a paperback book. The half-kilogram (1.1-pound) robot will use tracks and flippers to traverse a wide range of terrain types and overcome obstacles.

The Goals:

Design a small, intelligent and inexpensive mobile communications robot.
Operate in urban environments where other small robots often get trapped by relatively minor barriers.
Perform surveillance, reconnaissance and other investigative tasks.
Minimize weight, materials and manufacturing costs.

Sponsored by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the central R&D organization for the Department of Defense, iRobot is developing a small, inexpensive, robust and intelligent communications relay robot for operation in dense urban environments, as part of the LANdroids program.

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