iRobot has announced that they’ve received funding from DARPA to design and construct a prototype LANdroid. We wrote about DARPA’s LANdroid solicitation over at OhGizmo last June; the idea is to create an army of small, mobile, autonomous, network routers to keep advancing troop connected in battlefield conditions. LANdroids are designed to be used primarily in urban environments which have all sorts of inconveniently placed buildings that block more conventional wireless access points. These little guys are actually disposable: the idea is that they get dropped by advancing troops, whereupon they wander around until they find the most effective place to act as a network node. The bots work together to cover “shadowed” and indoor areas, and if one of them gets blown up, the rest will move themselves to keep the network operational.

see link here