PENTAGON EYES A DRONE APP STORE:

The US military has dozens of different types of drones in its arsenal. Each one has its own unique controller. And each of those various controllers flies a single robot. There’s no system that controls multiple drones at once. One Pentagon office thinks that’s an archaic way of doing business.

Inside the Pentagon’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics directorate, a team is working on ways to operate different types of drones with a single controller. It’s a big technical challenge — one that’s failed in the past — since the different manufacturers of different drones each have proprietary control software. But the official in charge of the effort envisions a new drone software architecture that’s agnostic about what kind of drone it controls; and allows human controllers to think in terms of drone fleets rather than individual robots, including fleets comprising different kinds of drones. That would enable a dramatic expansion of the possibilities of drone warfare.

Step one is to get a kind of universal remote for the drones — that is, a controller that can operate, say, an armed Predator and a jumbo Global Hawk spy. It’s a major challenge.

There would be a big training payoff to standardization, I imagine.