Bedford, Massachusetts company iRobot, A.K.A. the maker of the popular Roomba household vacuum-cleaner, does a lot more than cleaning living rooms these days. The company's robots are being deployed across the world, nearly 6,000 of them actually; cleaning up after Fukushima's nuclear meltdown, doing search and rescue, and even bomb disposal duty in Iraq. As more of these iRobots are becoming security, defense, and first-response soldiers, it is important that we are fully apt in controlling them (yes, that even includes us Average Joes). With iRobot's new Android app, sniffing out bombs or picking up toxic waste is merely a click of a tablet away.

iRobot's new controller system, called uPoint Multi-Robot Control, lets anyone manipulate these soldier bots via Android tablet and app. In the past, familiarizing oneself with the robot's hardware-based control system had a significant learning curve. Each robot had its own set of controls, including a joystick, a separate monitor, and a whole bunch of separate controls for each moving part of the bot. The more sensors the robot had, the more complicated each controller would grow (Mashable). According to Cnet, uPoint Multi-Robot Control uses easy point-and-click touchscreen controls to move the robot in location, move its body parts, as well as switch to other robots on the field. The new software also allows multiple robots to be controlled at once (all of them if you want), and as a result of its simplified process, training time is shortened to about one minute.

This program works on virtually any Android tablet in the market. Simply bring-your-own-device (BYOD), and you can control “nearly every facet and feature of the iRobot's robotic product range” (Zdnet). And it's just as simple as it sounds. It's nearly like any game you play with on your tablet. The system allows you to tab between each robot you want to control, and via the app's live-view screen, you can see the location of a robot, and drag your finger to where you want to navigate them. This program doesn't use Bluetooth, but rather uPoint Robot Radio, which “enables robot-to-robot networking and automatic switching to avoid congested frequencies during emergencies” (Newsfactor).

Using something so simple to control such complex beings will bring tremendous capabilities in the areas of defense, security, and search and rescue. As iRobot's technical director Orin Hoffman put it, "The more capability we put into our robots and the easier we make them to use, the more people will take them on more missions”. We can expect to see a demonstration of this technology during the AUSA 2014 Annual Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C., but will have to wait until 2015 to see the new software release.