Here's an interesting DARPA project someone threw out in IRC today. It looks a lot like what I did but a WHOLE lot smaller. The military can throw out a number of these things and build a communications network on the fly in a battle zone using wifi. I hope they use better encryption methods than the current public uses, but it still is a cool idea. It is also similar to a project that was done for urban search and rescue. Send out a team of robots, build some kind of mesh network and guide rescuers through the burning building or whatever.
The robots being proposed by DARPA are surprisingly inexpensive at about $100 each. I figured they would cost a lot more. One thing that made me laugh from the article on The Register. DARPA admits "it is expected that power will be a challenging design requirement". No way!!! Really??
