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DreamHammer Wants To Corner the Drone OS Market
nonprofiteer writes "The Pentagon is increasingly transforming the military into an unmanned force, taking soldiers out of harm's way and replacing them with drones and robots. In 2011, it spent $6 billion on unmanned systems. The problem is that the unmanned systems don't work well together thanks to contractors building proprietary control systems (to lock government into exclusive relationships and to make extra money). A company called DreamHammer plans to have a solution to this — a universal remote control that could integrate all robots and drones into one control system. It would save money and allow anyone to build apps for drones. 'DreamHammer CTO Chris Diebner compares it with a smartphone OS — on which drones and features for those drones can be run like apps. Of course, Ballista is doing something on a much larger scale. It means that it takes fewer people to fly more drones and that new features can be rolled out without the need to develop and build a new version of a Predator, for example.'"
Let's solve the problem of government being locked into exclusive relationships with other vendors by - locking them into an exclusive relationship with us! But our dog and pony show is more elaborate than theirs.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Look, there is a reason that some Army guy has a different method of access to his unmanned recon tracked vehicle than an Air Force guy has to a Predator with Hellfire missiles, who has different methods of access than a weather drone pilot in the Navy. That separation creates very large walls that make it difficult to make mistakes.
Should the Pentagon have requirements for how a User Interface should look and feel? Hell yes they should. There should not ever be a simplified method of access across platforms. It's extremely dangerous.
On the other hand, I'm sure someone in the Pentagon has a friend or relative that needed cash so put out a bid on something like this despite the extremely obvious dangers.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Exactly. Making each unmanned system have its own interface and potentially communication protocols is another layer of security. This is the military, manpower cost is nil. Having an all powerful remote control system just screams single point of failure!
Hack one system, own all the drones.
...then target the telemarketers who keep calling my mobile phone.