For those who dream of force multiplication—military tacticians and teenage nerds alike—not much beats having a drone. Unless it’s having a whole fleet of coordinated drones. That vision got a little closer to reality on May 15, when DreamHammer, a Santa Monica startup, rolled out a beta version of software that would allow one person to control multiple unmanned vehicles. The software, called Ballista, works for all sorts of drones: aerial vehicles, wheeled rovers, ships, or submarines. In theory, a single person wielding an iPad could carry out a personal robo-D-day.
Ballista is meant to solve a little-noted problem with today’s drones: They’re not that much more efficient, personnel-wise, than manned vehicles. Each drone that U.S. military and intelligence services send on a mission requires a whole support and operations team, including a pilot, a person managing peripheral equipment (usually a camera or other sensor), someone to plan the route, and someone to make sense of the data.
