What do you do with a robot armed with a million-round-per-minute gun? "Crowd control," naturally. For several months, Metal Storm, the troubled electronic gun developer, has been working with iRobot -- the makers of military machines and cute, semi-autonomous vacuum cleaners -- to arm some of their new, 250-pound unmanned ground vehicles. Last week, at a defense trade show, the two firms showed off the results of their joint venture. Metal Storm's weapons fire bullets electronically, instead of with firing pins and primer. The ammunition is stacked, rather than mechanically reloaded. And the only moving parts in the weapon are the ammunition itself. Which means the weapon can fire at a rate of thousands of rounds per minute -- maybe even up to a million, theoretically.
Metal Storm's 40mm weapons mount, the company tells us, can deliver both high-explosive and less-lethal rounds. Which makes it perfect for everything from urban assaults to "border patrol" to "infrastructure protection" to "crowd control."
Ordinarily, iRobot's military bots have been used to look out for terrorists and their improvised bombs. But, in the last year, the company has made a push into armed robotics, signing deals with stun-gun maker Taser and with Metal Storm. Its rival, Foster-Miller, has already tried out its machines with Metal Storm weapons, and has three machine gun-toting 'bots in Iraq. Because of safety concerns, however, they're not seeing much action. Not even crowd control.