Ground robots were widely used on the battlefield in the last decade responding to very specific threats such as IEDs, but with a very different and more complex environment evolving, iRobot is moving forward to make its robots easier to operate and suitable for almost any environment, a company official said.
“Over the next year…two of the biggest priorities are to focus on ways make robots more intuitive and easy to operate and adapting existing robots to new missions,” Mark Belanger, director of iRobot U.S. Government programs, said.
Photo: iRobot
With more than 5,000 fielded robots, the mission is going to change, and iRobot will work on how to take fielded robots and extend their mission life, he said. Many PackBots, for example, have been out a decade or more.
“The easiest way to help acclimate warfighters to the use of robots…is to make robots easier to use, so there is less training, less operator input day-to-day.”
With a family of products, “we really do feel we have a developed a platform that’s really suitable for almost any scenario,” Belanger said. The goal is to make switching from one to another as easy as possible.
And, since the Army has so many robots, “we need to help the Army find ways to make robots useful.”
First you have to determine what problem you’re trying to solve, he said.
As robots were used on battle pretty widely in the last decade in response to very specific threat, the future holds a wide number of other missions robots could perform.
While software has become much more complicated, and will continue in that vein, for the user, “we expect to become significantly easier to use a robot…and robots will become more part of our day to day lives,” Belanger said. iRobot’s AWARE 2 software has a lot in common across the robotic platforms, and the company leverages a common architecture. Users can pick up one robot, and then a different one, but they’re already familiar with how it behaves.
iRobot has seen a rise in the number of missions robots are being customized for. PackBot, for example, is most widely used for EOD missions or counter-IED, but “since then we’ve seen a growing demand” for a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and high- yield Explosives (CBRNE), Belanger said. “We’ll take the same base, not go design a new robot.”
For example, a CBRNE kit can easily be installed and removed with just a couple of hand tools, so an operator can convert his robot in minutes.
“It’s one of the beauties of having modular multi-mission platform,” he said.
The military has seen what robots can do to help save lives, doing what they do best, providing situational awareness and stand-off protection.
“Where we see things going in many ways, is a migration of some of the technology” into civilian law enforcement base and for first responders who face similar issues–IEDs or explosives, or the need to go into buildings and provide information back.
There’s a synergy for the defense security applications that cross over to the consumer world, he said.
International sales also are increasing.
“Over the last two years alone, the international market has gone from being roughly 15 percent to close to 50 percent” of the business, Belanger said. During the wars overseas, the United States fought alongside coalition partners who were exposed to the robots–mostly U.S. owned–now they need their own organic capability. We’ve fielded systems to 45 or so partner nations and numbers are growing. It’s the largest growing market for us now.”