Official News - page 8

REAL LIFE NEWS: THE RISE OF THE LANDROIDS

by Hazed

The American military research and development department, DARPA, has come up with a scheme to develop "LANdroids", a cute name for a collection of small crawling radio-relay robots. The plan is that these cheap, expendable droids, each of which is no larger than a deck of cards, would be scattered about by US troops on foot. They would then link up to form a wireless network which could penetrate into every corner of difficult terrain - such as urban areas where there are areas out of line-of-sight - which would then be used to transmit voice or data.

Right now, radio comms are not all that reliable for foot soldiers involved in operations in urban areas - especially indoors. But in the future, troops planning to storm a building, an underground bunker complex, or caves could drop LANdroids as they proceed, providing an instant Wi-Fi network that will keep them in touch with those outside.

The herd of droids would use multiple pathways in its network - much like the internet itself - and so would be able to heal itself in the event of individual droids being destroyed. Each one would consist of a radio, robotic platform, battery and small processor. The aim is to get the final production cost down to $100 each or less, so that they are truly expendable.

The robot part of these devices will have to be capable of moving across a variety of surfaces, both artificial and natural - concrete, asphalt, carpet or rock - at a slow crawl. They won't have to climb stairs or clamber over obstacles because the soldiers that deploy them will be able to carry them over difficult bits before releasing them. But they will have to move around in order to adjust the connection to the rest of the swarm, to get the best signal propagation. They would also shift around to eliminate blackspots caused by one of the LANdroids going offline - that's the self-healing capability.

DARPA expects that one of the challenges in developing this technology is going to be the power requirement. The tiny droids will need to weigh up the power costs of moving a node to get better reception against that of staying put and transmitting at higher power, for instance.

You can read more details in this news report on The Register, which includes a nice illustration of what a member of the LANdroid pack might look like.

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