how about, when you deploy a bot, it's added to a "squad" (led by the player) that can only support up to 4 bots at a time: if any more bots are deployed, the oldest explodes doing damage to anything near it: from there, the squad acts alot like the half life squad system: usually, they just follow you, but if you need them to go somewhere, you would use something like a laser pointer to tell them to get their asses down there, attack that enemy, shoot that wall, etcetera
this sounds like a great idea. if anyone needs models, i'm right here