Its Warrior and 110 FirstLook bots are built for the military, and now the Advanced Inflatable Robot (AIR) arm model is joining its armed forces brethren.

ENGADGET: iRobot's AIRarm prototype bot has an inflatable arm for manipulating objects, was built at DARPA's behest

But according to Tadashi Yamazaki, one of the scientists who worked on the project, the baseball-playing robot is the second largest model of its kind and it runs in real time, meaning its much faster than other systems.

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Its chief creator, Colin Angle, was an undergraduate at MIT when he built his first model, Genghis, the coolest robot ever seen up to that time (it was 1989).

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"Because the honey bee brain is smaller and more accessible than any vertebrate brain, we hope to eventually be able to produce an accurate and complete model that we can test within a flying robot, " said Dr Marshall.

BBC: Bee brains help to make robots smarter

The working model of the sensory systems will then be used in a robot to see if it can move around the world with the sophistication of a honey bee.

BBC: Bee brains help to make robots smarter