Making UAV control open-platform

The need for this is only going to grow. [Link]

Proprietary platforms vs. industry standards ... closed kernels vs. open source .. the cathedral vs. the bazaar... those are familiar fault lines to anyone who has followed the Great Intellectual Property Debate that has taken place in the IT and software industries for the last three decades. Yet that same debate is also playing itself out right now in the defense sector (of all places), where an attempt is underway to liberate the cockpit interface used in many Pentagon unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from the proprietary grip of the company that manufactures them.

It's fascinating, actually. San Diego-based General Atomics currently manufactures both the MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper UAVs that have been used so extensively by US forces in the skies over Iraq and Afghanistan. The UAVs are unmanned, of course, but they're not autonomous robots — most are piloted remotely by pilots who sit in cockpit-like ground control stations that act as the primary interface between the soldiers and their machines. Since the UAVs were developed by General Atomics, General Atomics also sells all the ground control stations, because the company holds a proprietary lock on the technology used to link the aircraft to their human controllers. Raytheon wants to change that. At the moment, Raytheon is making an unsolicited bid to sell the Pentagon a new, open-platform version of the standard UAV ground-control station. In the magazine's 10 Nov. issue, Aviation Week reports