From the Dept. of Freaking Your Shit Out

The folks who made the Roomba are now creating a softball-sized military robot that can squeeze under your doorjamb:

"During military operations it can be important to gain covert access to denied or hostile space... We believe that a new class of soft, flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions to perform various tasks will be quite valuable in many missions."

Here are the robo-specs:

According to the original proposal from DARPA, in just 2 years a prototype approximately the size of a softball—i.e., 10cm across—must achieve all this:
a) travel a distance of 5 meters at a speed of 0.25 meters/minute;
b) achieve a 10-fold reduction in its largest dimension; and
c) squeeze through a 1 cm opening of arbitrary geometry and reconstitute its original size and shape, in 15 seconds.

It could be a variant on this cute little guy: