CHELMSFORD, MASSACHUSETTS - The U.S. Army is looking for a few good robots. Not to fight -- not yet, at least -- but to help the men and women who do. These robots aren't taking up arms, but the companies making them have waged a different kind of battle. At stake is a contract worth almost half a billion dollars for 3,000 backpack-sized robots that can defuse bombs and scout enemy positions. Competition for the work has spilled over into Congress and federal court.

The U.S. Department of Defense will soon spend about $1 billion to deploy robot soldiers in the field, alongside -- and eventually in place of -- human troops. "Within five years, I have no doubt there will be robots in every Army formation," said Bryan McVeigh, the Army's project manager for force protection, as quoted in an article published by Bloomberg. McVeigh reported that there have been about 800 robots put into military service within the last 18 months. "This is an exciting time to be working on robots with the Army." The American branch of the British-based science and technology conglomerate QinetiQ and the Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based Endeavor Robotics have received the lion's share of the contracts to develop the robot warriors.

Robot-maker Sean Bielat says he's fine with the Dallas Police Department's apparently unprecedented use of a police bomb-disposal robot to kill a gunman on Thursday. "A robot was used to keep people out of harm's way in an extreme situation," said Bielat, the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a spinoff of iRobot's military division. "That's how robots are intended to be used." Joergen Pedersen, the CEO of RE2 robotics and the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association's robotics division concurred. "If these robots are used in manners for which they were unintended, we would expect that the officers who are there to keep citizens and themselves safe would use good judgment where the application of lethal force is a last resort," he said.

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. DON'T MISS: I built a Wi-Fi paradise and all I needed was one device 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.