I am a little freaked by this Wired article about the pending deployment of robot reconnaissance vehicles in Iraq:

Four cameras and a pair of night-vision binoculars allow the robot to operate at all times of the day. It has a range of about a half-mile in urban areas, more in the open desert. And with the ability to carry four 66-mm rockets or six 40-mm grenades, as well as an M240 or M249 machine gun, the robots can take on additional duties fast, said GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike.

As Pike notes, you can put these things where you wouldn’t want to put a soldier. And robots don’t have family at home, which is a good thing. Foster-Miller, the company that makes the Talon robot, is based here in New England…their name reminds me of something out of a William Gibson novel.