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The iRobot 710 Kobra. This is the company's biggest military bot. With a gripper arm attachment like this, it can lift 330 pounds.iRobot
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The robot is for heavy-duty bomb disposal. If something is in the way, the 710 is big enough to move it.iRobot
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The base platform can take a few different attachments. iRobot and Metal Storm had at one point experimented with weaponizing the 710.iRobot
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This is the 110 FirstLook. It's iRobot's tiniest military robot.iRobot
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How tiny? It's throwable! It's tough enough to be heaved through a window and do some reconnaissance.iRobot
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For a little bigger 'bot, there's the 310 SUGV. This is the smallest robot with a manipulator arm, and it's capable of climbing stairs.
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The 310 only weights 30 pounds, so it can be shoved into a backpack, making it capable and portable.iRobot
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The 510 Packbot is a "multi mission" robot. It's modular, submersible in water, and can be controlled with a Xbox controller. You can attach sensors, manipulator arms, cable cutters, and tons of other tools to it.iRobot
iRobot is most famous for its Roomba robotic vacuum line, but the company also has a sizable "Defense and Security" division, which makes robots for the US Armed Forces and various police forces. Or at least it used to—iRobot has announced that the military division will be sold off and formed into a separate company.
The press release says that Arlington Capital Partners will buy the division for "up to $45 million [£31 million] in total consideration." The new company will be fully dedicated to military and police robots, and it will be led by the existing Defense and Security management team. There's no name for the new company yet—that will be saved for when the transaction closes in the next 90 days.
iRobot's military robots all followed the same basic formula. They're driven by a pair of continuous tracks with a second set of tracks attached to the front. The front tracks could be actuated, lifting up off the ground and allowing the robot to climb obstacles like stairs and rocks. The body of the robots were platforms that iRobot outfitted with various capabilities, usually robotic arms with cameras or gripper arms. That basic design came in a few different sizes, ranging from something you could throw through a window to a robot that would fit in a backpack or a heavy-duty bot weighing as much as 500 pounds.
iRobot will become a much friendlier company with a "focus on the home," where it currently offers cleaning and remote presence robots. The new company's robots are instead used for reconnaissance, bomb and hazmat disposal, and vehicle inspections. The idea is that if something goes wrong, it's the robot that gets hurt and not a person. The robots have seen tons of action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were even sent in to help with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.Spinning off the military division is undoubtedly a good PR move for iRobot. It's inevitable that these robots get weaponized (which iRobot has already experimented with) and we doubt many people would want their vacuum cleaner to be related to a killbot. The press release notes that the consumer division has grown to become "much larger" than the defense division with over 14 million robots sold.
With iRobot's military division gone, now the most dangerous thing its robots will have to deal with is the family dog.
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