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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.'"
I haven't laughed that hard in a long time!
Do you realize the technical ineptitude in the military?
Our Network guys didn't even know what a routing loop was, or how I could take down the network in this one relatively unguarded room (that happened to house the routers).
We were lining up a satellite for our network access and it had to point x degrees; my lieutenant (college grad, because all officers are required to have Bachelor's degree in {INSERT RANDOM FIELD HERE}) requested I ask the guy if this azimuth had to be shot from the base, and if so if it was along the side or from the center.
I was the only non-officer in my company that could keep a generator running; if it died, no one knew how to start it, despite the instructions being written fairly clearly.
A sergeant fulled said generator with oil until it was full (full being to the top of the fill-tube). Then we had a geyser of oil coming out of the exhaust. A Marine was moving our front end loader and rounded a left hand corner that had a bank sloping down to the right...with the bucket up. Of course it tipped over.
These are but a few examples I've seen. The Army's SOP (standard operating procedure) for the Raven B UAV system is to stall it at 100-150 feet (I think) and let it fall to the ground to land. We were taught that $1000 in damages for 5 flights was acceptable/expected. The Marine's SOP was to do the same but at 50-75 feet to minimize damage.
I was a Marine. I'm proud of my service, but I'm not proud of the Marine Corps. It's full of a bunch of coddled stupid pussies. But the military should NOT be in charge of their own control systems for technical devices, not without a lot more technical education for those serving in the technical fields, which isn't going to happen with 4 years of service then treating everyone like shit so the majority leave.