Houston, March 19 (IANS): Brazil has secured a $7.2 million deal with iRobot, a US-based company that makes defence and security robots for the American military, who will create 30 new robots tasked with protecting and monitoring 12 cities during this year's football World Cup.

The robots, called PackBots from iRobot, a Massachusetts-based company, are pre-programmed to analyse suspicious looking objects, reports Xinhua.

The robots will start monitoring from June in the run up to FIFA 2014 World Cup event, according to the online marketing and publicity services website PRWeb.

Each robot can fit in a backpack, reach up to nine miles per hour whilst traversing all kinds of terrain and can travel in water up to two metres deep.

PackBot's other attributes include a state-of-the-art GPS, video image display, system monitoring, electronic compass and temperature sensors. The robot is manipulated with an integrated Pentium-based computer.

The sleek PackBot robot system, designed by iRobot, made its debut in 2002 in Afghanistan, where it helped soldiers clear bunkers, caves, collapsed buildings and to cross minefields. The versatile machine was used again in 2003 in Iraq in urban warfare situations and to search vehicles, according to Robohub, an online platform dedicated specifically to robotics.

By 2007, more than 800 of these military robots were in use throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and several other countries. The PackBot was also the first remote controlled robot to enter the Fukushima nuclear facility after the East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.