[LarryLied]

The small robots will be approximately five centimeters (two inches), or smaller, in any single dimension. They will work cooperatively together in groups of five to 10 robots and be capable of different modes of locomotion (e.g., land, water, and vertical climbing)

Philip K. Dick predicted this in the 1950's. His minature robots had artillery.

[Libertarianize the GOP]

Looks like you were pinging me just as I indexed the thread to miltech. Looks like some interesting links.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Taqlk about some Gee Whiz stuff!

[edwin hubble]

Thanks for the ping...

Advances like these are often missed by mainstream science fiction writers. Asimov's robot series may be the best. His psycho-history is in the ballpark with some of this stuff.

And the "futurists" often miss the big breakthroughs. I have Alvin Toffler's 1975 book "Future Facts": 300 pages of gizmo's, but he totally missed the personal computer as we know it... and it came just years after his book.

A big note about all the DARPA work. If the technology gets exported to the asian mainland we will have to face it later in an adversarial way.

[weikel]

Cool( sorry for late response I was in Cape Cod for mem. day weekend).

[hedgetrimmer]

Eventually such tiny robots could be dropped from planes by the thousands to gather military intelligence, sniff out land mines or investigate chemical spills, say the micro-bot designers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.