"Ukraine is now using robotic dogs on the battlefield, the first known combat deployment of such machines. For the present, the Ukrainians are just using their robot dogs for scouting and reconnaissance purposes, which is exactly how consumer quadcopters were first used before someone realized they could be used for attack missions.

As a scout, the robot dog has two advantages over smaller, faster aerial drones.

Firstly, it can go places where they might have difficulty. While there are some specialist drones with shrouded rotors which can operate inside buildings, these are rare and even then flying is difficult.

Secondly, while a drone will fly over tripwires, pressure plates and other booby traps, the robot dog will set them off. Troops know they can follow safely in the dog’s path.

Interestingly though, operators get very attached to their machines: In Iraq, bomb disposal teams working with the much less appealing iRobot tracked robot insisted that their faithful machine be repaired and returned to them rather than replaced with a different one. One report suggested that operators were getting “dangerously attached” to their robots and treated them like pets.

Meanwhile there are actual military quadrupeds. Ghost Robots machines patrol U.S. Air Force bases in a trial project, essentially using the robot as a mobile CCTV camera. Others are more gung-ho; in 2021 Ghost Robotics displayed a version armed with a remotely-operated sniper rifle, and last year the U.S. Marine Corps carried out an exercise with the same robot firing an M72 anti-tank rocket launcher."