US military chokes on stream from robots' fat pipes A lack of decent software means that information harvested from unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan is not being used properly. The military is deploying thousands of these pilotless machines in Iraq and Afghanistan but is hamstrung by a lack of resources to properly deal with all the video footage created and by …
"adding geographical information to existing video footage to make it more usable"
Are you telling me that the photos and videos aren't even geotagged!? They just pile up the tapes somewhere and (if viewed later) try to figure out if the desert cliffs in the footage are in yemen or afganistan, based on which pile the tape was in?
"Are you telling me that the photos and videos aren't even geotagged!? They just pile up the tapes somewhere and (if viewed later) try to figure out if the desert cliffs in the footage are in yemen or afganistan, based on which pile the tape was in?"
Why do they need to geotag. If a place on the map looks like th footage just bomb it. Better safe than sorry.
Most of the drone-cam stuff is used to either target a missile strike or to guide troops. There's not really a need to tag it with anything other than "Sharpie on the CD", because the subject of the video is probably not going to be around past the end of the footage.
And the vast majority is "dude screwing sheep" so there's no reason to keep it at all, unless you're into that sort of thing.
If the USAF weren't so pig headed, let cheaper and lower ranks do a lot of the work, plus actually listened to other people, there are cheap and ready to go solutions out there. Unfortunately, politics and empire building keeps getting in the way. I suspect the contractors don't really want to play ball either as this would cut into their profit margins.
People have offered solutions to the USAF almost for free (I know this for a fact) and they refused to play ball. They are also going to have to learn how to declog the bandwidth because all this fancy tech is generating huge amounts of data and there is only so much you can send via satellites, plus the grunts are going to get pretty hacked off that their requests for air support is being blocked by a congested network!
"If we have enough data, the problem will be solved"
You want information, not more data. As more data are added, the problems of finding what you need get harder and harder. It's like Pratchett's omniscope: becase it can show you everything, it is practically useless at showing anything in particular.
THINK before you add more sensors and more data.
Let people pay USD 100 per month to drive the drones, the person who spots The Taliban gets Gold which can be used to buy more and better missiles - spot 10 and you get to launch a missile. Its perfectly safe, the missiles are intelligent and always, always hit "Taliban Leaders"; we know that from the news.
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