Our favorite makers of home robots, iRobot, won’t be satisfied until one of their creations kills us dead at home under the guise of cleaning or tidying up. One day your local police will have a special RV unit. That stands for Robotics Victim.

Anywho, iRobot has filed an iPatent for a lawn-mowing robot. It’s an 84-page filing with a variety of configurations, even an all-electric model and gas-electric hybrid. Some have acoustic and optical sensors that would seem to allow the robot to “avoid hard surfaces, water and other barriers”. Look, I’m on board with any bot you wanna put in my home. All I ask is that it’s aware of the fact that my heart pulled through my chest will kill me dead. Well, that and I want it to not be thrilled with that image.

If you didn’t already know, the military has been using iRobot’s services for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sending versions called PackBots specially made to sniff out IEDs and do scouting in dangerous places so that real humans aren’t in danger.

With over 900 PackBots sold and in use so far the iRobot Corporation and Boeing are teaming up to create a new next gen robotic scout that will serve in the military as well as private sectors. Dubbed the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV) Early, this …