When the U.S. military first got serious about ground robots, it bought up a bunch of 42-pound machines called PackBots. The name implied that infantrymen would just throw the robots in their rucksacks. In reality, the things were too heavy for already-overloaded troops to carry around on the regular. The PackBot’s main competitor, the Talon, was even more of a burden. It weighed a whopping 125 pounds.

Now, there’s a new wave of reconnaissance bots being prepared for combat. And they are radically smaller than the previous generation; the tiniest of them weigh less than a pound-and-a-half. Which means they’ll not only fit inside a backpack, they might even squeeze inside a jacket or a pair of pants. Call them pocketbots.

Both the U.S. Army and Marine Corps are expected shortly to issue “urgent” battlefield requests for 3,500 to 5,000 of the micro machines. The idea that these new models can be tossed into a building or over a wall, allowing an infantryman to get a sense of what’s inside a room before he kicks down the door.

Three different bot-makers showed off their pocketbot models at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference in Washington this week. If they work as advertised, they could be the next big leap forward for military robotics.

Ground robots were originally issued to a specialized few, like explosive ordnance disposal technicians. That eventually grew to an unmanned force that’s now 2,000 strong in Afghanistan. These machines are so small, the military could potentially expand the robotic army even further.

“We can provide this capability to ever soldier on the battlefield,” says retired Navy Captain Robert L. Moses. He’s an executive with iRobot, maker of the original PackBot — and a new, nine-inch “throwable” machine.

The First Look (that’s a video of it, above) appears to be almost identical to the PackBot. Like the bigger machine, it’s got flippers that allow it to spring up stairs (I saw it climb steps as big as the ‘bot). It’s got four color cameras, peeking out in every direction, and it can form a mesh network with its fellow machines. But the First Look has one not-entirely-insignificant difference from the Packbot: it’s five pounds, not 42.

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