Andros robots, were originally developed in the United States by REMOTEC, but they became heavily customized by Israeli engineers to handle urban booby-traps during conflicts in Lebanon and the First Intifada.
By Hezy Laing
The IDF is today a world leader in the use of military robots for a wide range of activities. But how did it all start? When did the IDF first begin using robots?
During the post-Yom Kippur War phase, spanning from late 1973 to 1979, the conflict exposed massive IDF vulnerabilities to Egyptian and Syrian minefields and fortified positions.
The first “robots” were not autonomous machines, but remote-controlled engineering devices, essentially mechanized extensions of sapper units.
These early systems were crude but established the principle that machines could take on lethal tasks traditionally assigned to soldiers.
Israel revolutionized combat engineering by militarizing massive civilian earthmovers and developing remote-controlled explosive systems to navigate dense minefields and fortified positions.
During the Second Intifada across the Gaza, Judea, and Samaria sectors, the critical necessity emerged to integrate robotic vehicles directly into hazardous route-clearing operations.
The IDF therefore developed the Keter-Paz, a specialized all-terrain vehicle dispatched ahead of primary tactical forces to safely investigate or intentionally disrupt suspected explosive points.
This specific engineering project materialized rapidly after Captain Ian Rochanski, an elite officer from the Yahalom unit, was tragically killed in the Avivim sector along the Lebanese border on January 19, 2004, while actively exposing and attempting to neutralize hidden improvised explosive devices.
The summer of 1993 saw a tragic event in Wadi El-Faresh, Southern Lebanon, when a Golani Brigade engineering detachment walked into an improvised explosive device (IEOD) zone, resulting in eight fatalities.
During the rescue, the unit’s pathfinder and an explosives officer, Captain Avi Fisher, were also killed. This disaster prompted the IDF to significantly overhaul and enhance its IEOD response capabilities.
Alongside this specialized ATV, the IDF actively began developing autonomous bulldozers designed to overcome obstacles within heavily threatened environments while completely removing the operator from physical danger.
This formative period laid the critical groundwork for modifying the Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, successfully transforming it from a standard construction vehicle into an armored engineering asset.
During the 1990s, the technological landscape shifted toward Andros robots, which were originally developed in the United States by REMOTEC but became heavily customized by Israeli engineers to handle urban booby-traps during conflicts in Lebanon and the First Intifada.
This strategic shift firmly established the modern IDF philosophy of standoff capability, cementing the rule of never sending a human soldier into a lethal chokepoint if a machine can go first.
The modern era from the 2000s to the present day, introduced the direct successors to those early remote-controlled platforms, semi-autonomous UGVs.
These include the Guardium UGV, which was introduced in the mid-2000s as one of the world’s first operational, semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicles used to patrol borders equipped with cameras and thermal sensors.
Additionally, the Sahar, or Moon, robot emerged as a fully ruggedized, unmanned engineering system designed specifically for route clearance, mine detection, and mapping dangerous paths ahead of infantry columns.
Finally, today’s elite engineering units utilize the IRIS and various micro-tactical robots, which are extremely small, throwable reconnaissance devices built to scout inside hostile tunnels, sewers, and buildings before any human soldiers enter the space.
