The New Mobile Infantry (continued 2/4)

War is dangerous and bloody, and no robot can fundamentally change that. But the generation of tactical mobile robots now in development promises to help soldiers and save lives by taking on the tasks that Michael Toscano, coordinator for the Joint Robotics Program at the Pentagon, sums up as "dirty, dangerous, and dull."

From the outside, the SAIC Center for Intelligent Robotics and Unmanned Systems hardly looks like the home of a highly advanced platoon of military machines. The lab butts up against Colorado's Front Range on the outskirts of Littleton, about 15 miles southwest of Denver. It's one of several offices in a rectangular brick structure that could easily be mistaken for a vacant strip mall. The place is eerily silent. A tumbleweed is lodged under a rusty truck in the parking lot. A wild hare darts through the blond grass. The windows are tinted, blinds shuttered.

"We picked the building because the bad guys would never suspect we are doing such sensitive work inside," explains Blitch, who's standing in his office. He's wearing a neatly pressed white oxford shirt tucked into faded black Levis. His hair, which has receded a bit, is close-cropped and spiky in front. Blitch bolts down the hallway and through a steel door into a 3,000-square-foot high bay stocked with electronics and metallurgy equipment. There are at least a half dozen robots positioned around the room with technicians tending to each.

Jim Hamilton, a software engineer, demonstrates the lab's prize work in progress, a prototype TMR that's part of SAIC's Raptor (short for robotic autonomous perception technology for off road) project. Raptor can function as part of a marsupial system, a concept he's been developing since 1995. "We wanted to penetrate a bunker, but the robot, called Goldie, was too large to fit inside," says Blitch. "So we placed a smaller tethered robot on top of her, and when Goldie got close enough we drove the second one off and into the bunker." The Raptor project, launched in 2001 with Darpa funding, will eventually include a small team of marsupial robots with a Raptor vehicle acting as the mothership. Troops will be able to air-drop Raptor into enemy territory, where it will release a team of smaller, roaming "munitions bots," or M-bots. These roamers will relay data back to the mother bot, which aggregates the information and transmits it wirelessly. The first ground-to-ground-to-air marsupial system, Raptor will give the military a way to scout behind enemy lines and gather strategic information, an assignment often carried out by a squad of paratroopers outfitted with night vision equipment, walkie-talkies, and M16s.

That's the hope. But the only territory the Raptor prototype searches these days is the SAIC parking lot. The prototype is built atop a commercial all-terrain vehicle, though if the robot is approved for military production it will be upgraded for battle with a low-profile, heavily armored exterior. Hamilton turns on the gas-powered Raptor with what looks like a car key (the next version will have an automated startup), programs a route via laptop, and uploads it wirelessly to the TMR. The machine gracefully motors around the parking lot, following Hamilton's choreographed movements. For manual steering, he employs an off-the-shelf Logitech joystick. Eventually, Blitch wants to create a digital glove that would allow soldiers to execute commands using American Sign Language: "You want to be able to hold your weapon in one hand and control the robot with the other," explains Blitch. Images and sounds from as many as 30 onboard sensors - including infrared, night vision, digital cameras, directional microphones, GPS, and laser radar for making detailed 3-D maps of almost any terrain - will transmit data over a wireless LAN to a display in the soldier's helmet. At the same time, M-bots will send their findings back to a Raptor vehicle so the incoming information can be assembled into a detailed real-time rendering of the targeted area and uploaded to a satellite.

2