It may not look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character, but robots designed to tote automatic weapons could give a key advantage to American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Soaring demand for a bomb disposal robot called Talon in Iraq has helped QinetiQ to post a strong rise in profits, despite a slowdown in overall defence spending by Britain.

QinetiQ has sold more than 1,000 Talon robots, with about a third of those heading for Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday it announced that it had received more than $175 million (£84.5 million) of orders in the first half of the year.

Now American troops are evaluating a new version of the robot, called Sword – Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Direct-action System. Three of the armed robots have been deployed south of Baghdad by the 3rd Infantry Division. The devices are likely to be used in raids on suspected enemy compounds where there is a high risk of running into ambushes or booby traps.

They can climb stairs, negotiate rockpiles and move at 5.5mph. They are operated using a laptop and cost just over £100,000 a unit. Chrys Stevenson, the business development director for QinetiQ’s Land business, said: “The operators are able to control their missions from a position of relative safety.

“Of significant importance is that the operator remains in direct control of the Sword at all times and a person has to make the final decision to engage the target.”

The furthest advances in the area of robotic warfare have been in unmanned aerial vehicles, which were developed for surveillance work but now are capable of being used as platforms for launching missiles or dropping bombs.

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