DreamHammer reports successful demos of drone OS

DreamHammer, the company behind the Ballista drone operating system, reported today that it has completed a series of successful demonstrations of its technology with the U.S. Defense Department and UAS prime contractors.

The Business of Robotics recently wrote about how Lockheed Martin was able to successfully control multiple unmanned aerial systems using Ballista.

DreamHammer says its latest demonstrations prove Ballista’s out-of-the-box support of the UAS Control Segment (UCS) architecture, allowing for easy integration with current and future unmanned aircraft supporting UCS within the Defense Department.

“Ballista, by virtue of its open architecture, already has the ability to integrate with any proprietary UAS, allowing a single operator to simultaneously manage multiple unmanned vehicles,” the company said in a statement. “Ballista’s support of UCS now opens its commercial customers to ‘plug & play’ with the U.S. defense market.”

According to the company, Ballista comes prepackaged with open and extensible UCS-conforming models, middleware communications and user interface components. These components allow non-UCS-based systems to integrate their proprietary hardware and services into Ballista, bringing them up to the UCS standard and allowing them to interoperate with other UCS-based vehicles, sensors and services. The hope is that by making Ballista UCS conformant, it will help customers quickly bring their capabilities to market.

“Currently, the DoD has the world’s largest UAS fleet and the greatest need for affordability, therefore it was key to our customers to prove Ballista’s ability to meet the UCS interoperability standards out of the box,” Nelson Paez, CEO of DreamHammer, said in the statement. “We believe strongly that by supporting this standard the industry can begin to create the universal interoperability of drones which will enable the explosive growth of drones in both the government and commercial markets. Drones will be everywhere and used for everything whether for military or commercial purposes. By supporting UCS, drone manufacturers and developers using Ballista will have access to an annual $6.6 billion market.”

DreamHammer says it plans to provide support for other global unmanned standards such as STANAG 4586, MAVlink, and JAUS, in addition to other cross-domain standards in future releases.

[ photo courtesy U.S. Department of Defense ]