Agressive squad-level tactics with robotic squires, what would change?

Question

Sometimes, your death on the battlefield will be the result of a string of minor inconveniences spiraling out-of-control. This is rather embarrassing, especially when happening to my main character, or when uploaded to youtube, but I came up with something to help it, the robotic squire, and faithful dog, Greta. What would it change?

Greta is the love child of Boston Dynamics videos, and the shadow hand. It is a quadruped robot, standing at around 1 m high and 1.5 m long.

• It uses pneumatic artificial muscles, actuated by multiple air compressors and air-bladders, for enhanced redundancy, and to be lightweight.
• The unit is powered by lithium-air batteries.
• The armor is equal to a level III steel plate, not impenetrable, but an AR-15 won't get through it.

As I mentioned, Greta also has a shadow hand that can be used to pick up and hand objects over. Greta can also place stuff into its storage compartment, like a furnace that's suitable for repairing ceramic plates on-field.

Greta looks kinda like this.

Each human squad gets three of them. Gretas can pull people into cover, but after watching the Matrix and Terminator trilogy in a row, we're unwilling to let them shoot anything other than a photograph. Gretas are remotely controlled by rudimentary AIs and a handful of human "handlers".

The setting is modern day, ordinary equipment for humans is roughly the same what US marines would get, the enemy is playing on an equal field this time.

I'm interested in how could they help the most in pushing forward and keeping the enemy under pressure.

Judgment criteria and priorities (highest to lowest):

• Helping humans keep the enemy under constant pressure.
• Minimalizing casualties.
• Speeding things up in general.

Answer 1

So assuming this is a USMC-esque rifle squad, this would be composed of 13 men- a squad leader and 3 4 men fireteams- plus the robot. While it wouldn't be a game changer, I imagine there are a number of ways in which it could provide a massive boost to the squad.

1. Equipment- Having a member of the squad capable of carrying fairly substantial amounts of equipment without tiring is going to be a massive advantage. The amount of ammunition the squad can carry is going substantially increased- in particular it would allow the automatic riflemen to be able to suppress a target for longer periods of time. Once the squad has dug in to a position, the robot would be well suited to running up spare ammunition from the platoon to the squad, with platoon robots also running ammunition from company to the platoon, so in effect you have a very low level logistics support for your infantryman. The robot could probably also carry anti tank equipment, mortars etc on patrol.

2. Reconnaissance- Being immune to intermediate caliber rifle fire, the robot could work well as a scout at the front of a patrol. Searching for IEDs, mines or potential ambushes without worrying about taking rifle fire would be a massive boost to morale for the rest of the squad as they are significantly less likely to be caught in an ambush or IED attack.

3. Demolitions- Given the bullet resistant nature of the robot, and it's low profile, it could be used a demolitions engineer fairly effectively- carrying explosives to bridges or enemy machine gun nests while the rest of the squad stays in cover.

4. Stretcher bearer- should anyone in the squad get hit, the robot can easily drag them in to cover. After stemming any bleeding, the robot (with an escort) can carry the soldier back to the company HQ, or a safe area, while they wait for a MEDEVAC.

5. Mobile .50 cal- mounting a heavy machine gun on top of the robot shouldn't be too difficult, meaning you have significantly more firepower available to a rifle squad. This would still have to be operated by a soldier, but being able to bring up heavier weapons to the squad that would be otherwise inaccessible to vehicle mounted weapons could prove particularly useful

Answer 2

Aggressive:

• blow up things: they could place a remote controlled bomb, or act as suicide bombers (depending on the situation and their price)
• they are probably heavy: could jump onto people
• they could get behind enemy troops: go somewhere, hide and wait
• spying on enemy movements
• get close to vehicles and attach tracker/explosive
• place communication equipment into hard to reach spots
• place espionage equipment
• depending on their temperature/cooling, they might be able to move easier at night because they might be invisible to infrared cameras (coating?)

Defensive:

• could provide shelter against bullets
• moving equipment after the troop, to make movement faster, therefore more secure
• move obstacles out of the way, if you have more of them, they could be pretty strong
• scouting areas
• make noise, distract enemies
• scare enemies into revealing themselves

You have to make sure though, that the enemy can't get close to them, because they too could attach remote controlled bombs or trackers.