That said, this is pretty neat:
Military robots well trained for war
[...] But the new conflict persuaded the military to move faster. At the time, the state-of-the-art means for clearing a cave was to tie a rope around the waist of an infantryman, who would crawl in and toss ahead a grappling hook to probe for mines or booby traps.
[...] Able to ride on tracks like a small tank, climb stairs and work under 3 meters of water or force of up to 400 times gravity, Packbots made their debut just six weeks later at a cave complex outside the village of Nazaraht, near the Pakistani border.
[...] Later, they offered advice, complaining that the signal wasn't penetrating the walls of deep caves. So Tom Frost, an iRobot engineer at the scene, built a makeshift network of radio repeaters by scavenging old Soviet trucks that littered Bagram Air Base. And when soldiers asked Frost if PackBot could work with the computers integrated into their clothing, he downloaded the necessary code over a satellite.
[...] And sometimes, especially in towns, what the soldiers really wanted was a "throw bot" they could toss over a wall or through a window.
