The War App: Smart Phones Could Control Drone Cameras

(Dec. 14) -- "Droid wars" could be the new "drone wars" as defense firms work to develop smart phone applications for the military, based on the increasing popularity of the iPhone, Android and similar devices.

Smart phone apps have taken off in the commercial marketplace, allowing consumers with smart phones to pay bills, make restaurant reservations or check arrival times for planes. But with the rapid proliferation of smart phones among soldiers, companies see a new market for apps. One company is developing applications for smart phones that would allow soldiers to control the cameras on overhead unmanned aircraft, allowing them to zoom in or out on a person or thing of interest.

Harris Corp., which brought NFL instant-replay technology to drone imagery collected in Afghanistan, is working on a variety of smart phone apps that would allow troops on the ground to collect and share their own images, view images collected by cameras at other locations or, in some cases, even control the images being collected by an overhead unmanned aircraft.

"You can grab the camera [on the unmanned aircraft] and zoom in and tilt it," John Delay, a strategy director in the company's broadcast division, said of that app.

Key to these apps is a Harris product called FAME, short for Full-Motion Video Asset Management Engine, a system that essentially stores and catalogs video, audio and other data collected by various sensors. FAME, which uses embedded metadata or tags to catalog the data, is designed to work with the multitude of video and imagery streams coming from military aircraft, including unmanned aerial vehicles such as the Predator or Scan Eagle and the manned Constant Hawk surveillance aircraft.

"You could have a Predator, a Constant Hawk sensor, ground cameras and guys with handheld devices, all represented in a common operation picture on Google Earth," Delay told AOL News.

Though Delay declines to comment on the specific military customers for the current work, he says the apps being developed would work, for example, with a new Air Force sensor system called Gorgon Stare that is being deployed soon to Afghanistan. Gorgon Stare stitches together images from multiple sensors, allowing the military to capture images of large areas, such as entire neighborhoods or parts of cities.

Harris isn't the only company working on smart phone apps for the military. Intelligent Software Solutions, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., is also working on apps that would allow users to record events -- like a bomb attack -- using a smart phone, annotate the picture and then send it back to a command center where others could quickly view it.

The company has government customers for its products, according to Carl Houghton, vice president of strategic planning at Intelligent Software Solutions. "We can't say who, but they're in Virginia," he told AOL News.

In the meantime, Harris is already thinking about future smart phone apps that might be used by the military. One possible application, according to Delay, would be to have a soldier with an iPhone manning a checkpoint. As a person drives through the checkpoint, the soldier could take a picture or even videotape a short interrogation, and then send the file into a central server and instantly verify the person's identity based on facial-recognition technology.

"The idea is to have an open platform and then have people develop the apps and ingest the data," Delay said.

Today it might be smart phones, but Delay says that in the future, soldiers will likely have cameras integrated into their helmets. "Eventually, a command person behind [the soldier] will be able to turn on the camera when he needs to see something," he said.

The soldier, Delay said, won't even know the camera is on.