Meet the robots that will help us win the wars of the future

If former Marine and entrepreneur Sean Bielat has his way, the law enforcement officer tentatively approaching a vehicle in the future after making a traffic stop won’t be an officer at all. Rather, those are the kind of interactions — fraught with uncertainty, potentially dangerous — that seem to him to make perfect sense for one of his robots to deal with instead.

Bielat is the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a privately held ground robotics company that in April spun out of Mass.-based iRobot and is focused on the defense, public safety and energy and industrial markets. It’s a young company, but already Endeavor has delivered some 6,000 robots to customers, everything from a roughly five-pound throwable robot perfect for surveillance and reconnaissance up to its 500-pound beast called the Kobra.

The Kobra has a 12-foot arm and can lift loads of up to a couple hundred pounds. Endeavor sees it as ideal for helping resolve large threats or dealing with things like vehicle-born explosive devices. The company has also been involved in trials with the Army using this robot, positioning it as potentially able to carry a squad’s equipment load.