When I approached the Recon Robotics booth at the annual Mock Riot in West Virginia last week to see the dumbell-shaped “Throw Bot” in action, David Gustafson told me to check back later — the bot needed charging. Half an hour later it was still charging. And a half hour after that. Finally, the little drone was ready, and Gustafson tossed it across the room for a quick demo.
One Danger Room reader isn’t surprised at this delay. “We had six of these in the Al-Anbar province,” he reports. ”Battery life wasn’t too good — we never used them.”
Now, those were development models. Another reader says the current production models are much more robust. But maybe Gustafson is being a tad optimistic when he predicts orders totalling 20,000 Throw Bots from the U.S. Army in Iraq.
See the bot in action below:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/oiZ7GLRNYfY" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
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[...] The EyeBall is a small, inexpensive robot equipped with day and night cameras and a mic, meant to be tossed into a room, so the thrower can look and listen without being seen. A platoon kit of three of the bots, along with a wireless monitor and handheld controller, costs around $5,000. Not surprisingly, the geeks of the press corps got all hot and bothered, when it debuted in 2005. Information Week called it the “stuff of sci-fi action flicks,” requiring just the “skill of a softball pitcher.” EyeBall is one of several “throw-able” bots to come out in recent years. So how has the machine performed, in the real world? Jason Reich, who writes for my personal blog War Is Boring, dropped in at an ODF facility a couple weeks ago to find out. “EyeBalls get daily operational use” in the Israel Defense Forces, Reich tells me. But not everyone in the IDF is thrilled with the device. Reich asked an Israeli special forces veteran what he thought of the ball-shaped robot spy. [...]