Most likely, the rockets are from the US Army's High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). The rockets, fired from ground vehicles, have a range of up to 43 miles and feature GPS guidance systems that are accurate to a meter.

In Steven Spielberg's movie Minority Report two officers need to search a building for the fugitive John Anderton played by Tom Cruise. "I confirm 28 warm bodies..." says one officer. "What do you think - four spiders, one per floor?" "Let's do eight - I gotta eat," says the other officer. The officers whip out spider robots from their belts and the robots proceed to search the entire building. The basics of this science fiction scene may not be too far from reality if the US Army has its way.

The US Army wants to upgrade its fleet of 3,000 small tactical robots in Iraq and Afghanistan by making them semi-autonomous, enabling them to perform some tasks without human direction.

Most current-generation robots rely on humans to make their every move. But the next generation robots will have capabilities such as independently moving towards destinations (and returning), moving around objects, and changing directions all by themselves.

iRobot's new AwareHead supervisory control system (see video at Engineering TV), for example, enables a human controller to point-and-click on a screen to send a robot to a given destination. A completely autonomous TALON robot recently demonstrated its ability to navigate and map a room on it's own. In the near future, a soldier will be able to send a robot into a building, tunnel, or sewer system and have the robot autonomously map and search the entire area for threats, and perhaps even neutralize discovered threats! Such robots will not only make the jobs of soldiers safer, but will decrease operator workload for commanding robots and free them up for other tasks. (Sources: US Army/Kris Osborn)

Darpa (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has selected six vendors to develop plans for a ground vehicle that can transform into a helicopter-like vehicle with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities. The program aims to develop a hybrid vehicle with a nautical range of 250 miles (land or air) that can accommodate four "warriors" and their equipment. The vehicle would be used to insert and extract fire teams, for resupply missions and medical evacuations.

Such vehicles would be especially suited for the stealthy insertion of special operations troops into areas with asymmetrical threats, such as Afghanistan with it's poor network of roads, mountainous terrain and varied insurgent threats. Initial planning will focus on propulsion systems, adaptable wing structures, lightweight materials and flight control systems. (Photo above: AAI and Lockheed Martin Co. Transformer concepts) (Source: Darpa)