Having seen combat and being exposed to some of these bots as a soldier in the recent past, I can confidently say that the mobility and situational awareness pr

Having seen combat and being exposed to some of these bots as a soldier in the recent past, I can confidently say that the mobility and situational awareness provided by some of these bots superlatively increases the operating effectiveness of a platoon. There was an instance when we were handed "maps" of an AO before an operation and to my surprise the maps were nothing more than hand drawn topo details, with rather miniscule details of the area itself. All this when the bad guys were using google maps to coordinate their own operations! Months later, we inducted a mobile UAV into the platoon and I still, to this day think about the number of times it saved us from certain trouble. Today, as I work on autonomous military bots as an engineer I can only appreciate the effort that goes into building these things. Occupancy grid mapping in a noisy environment of a battlefield being one the most challenging aspects of making these bots.