For those who dream of force multiplication—military tacticians and nerdy loners alike—there’s not a lot that beats having a drone. Unless, of course, it’s having a whole fleet of coordinated drones. That has now come a little closer to reality.
A startup called DreamHammer last week announced that it was rolling out a beta version of software that would allow for the coordinated control of multiple drones. And those drones wouldn’t have to all be in the air, either—some could be unmanned aerial vehicles, some could be wheeled rovers, some could be watercraft, or submarines. In theory, a single person wielding an iPad could carry out his own robo-D-Day.
Nobody is proposing that quite yet. But DreamHammer’s software, called Ballista, is meant to solve a little-remarked problem with today’s drones—they’re not that much more efficient, manpower-wise, than manned vehicles. Each drone the U.S. military and intelligence services send on a mission requires a whole support and operations team—a pilot, a person managing the payload–usually a camera or other sensor–someone to plan the route and make sense of the data that’s collected.
Ballista was meant to consolidate much of this. A single operator can control not only an entire drone, but many, using an intuitive tablet computer interface. “It’s a very proven software,” says Nelson Paez, CEO of 75-employee DreamHammer, which is based in Santa Monica, Calif. “It’s really the application layer that speaks to the human machine interface, and on the back end it talks to all of the legacy systems, the actual communication systems, the hardware on the payload systems.” That leaves the operator to concentrate on what the military calls mission management.
(A brief note on nomenclature: the company’s name, DreamHammer, has a distinctly Teutonic-thrash-metal ring, but as Paez earnestly explains, he came up with it to refer to the fact that tools like hammers are what have allowed human beings to outpace our fellow apes, and thereby fulfill our dreams. The name of the software, Ballista, comes from an ancient catapult-like weapon that revolutionized siege warfare.)
Part of the reason it’s proven difficult to coordinate drone controls is that each manufacturer uses its own proprietary software system. That makes sense for manufacturers—it’s a good way to lock customers into coming back for future purchases—but it also makes it difficult for vehicles from different manufacturers to share information, and slows innovation since outside parties don’t have access to the code. Paez compares it to the computers of the 50s and 60s: “You had your IBMs (IBM), your Honeywells (HON), your UNIVACs, they were complete turnkey solutions for clients in the financial and insurance and government space, those were the only guys who could afford it, and if you needed a new RAM you had to go to IBM. It was very expensive.”
Then, in the 1970s, along came Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL) and other software companies, offering interfaces and operating systems that sat on top of the code that ran personal computers and servers. It unified the experience across machines, and allowed different machines to be controlled in concert.
Paez argues that Ballista does that same thing for the still-balkanized world of drones. He predicts that this new interoperability will trigger a flood of new drone applications, the same way PC use metastasized in the 1980s. The company’s clients already include many of the biggest American drone and drone component manufacturers, but once the Federal Aviation Administration opens up U.S. airspace to unmanned aircraft, as it’s scheduled to do in 2015, the sector is going to explode, he predicts.
Paez does not fear the drone future. He waxes rhapsodic about the possibilities: FedEx (FDX) packages being ferried cheaply across the sky by formations of pilotless planes, unmanned tanker drones directed to fight forest fires by satellites–even, curiously, robot bartenders. “We need to get out of this Stone Age that we’re in,” he says. “GM (GM) and other car manufacturers gave been using robots since the 1960s.”
