Hacker puts a video cam on an RC truck and saves the lives of 6 soldiers | Hacker News Reader

Hacker puts a video cam on an RC truck and saves the lives of 6 soldiers

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272 pointsacangiano96 comments

The funny thing is that if the DoD contracted out to build these, they would end up costing over $1 million each. There are a lot of unique opportunities for startups that are willing to use off the shelf technology and package it in unique ways. Provided, of course, you don't have any ethical qualms about selling technology that might be used for good or evil.

Isn't that true of any technology?

Not the PSP controllers they use to control various things. The DoD gets those cheaper than we do.

Actually, if you don't sell it for at least 1M$, you won't get any contract, it doesn't look serious enough. Terrestrial drones were being done during WWII, Russians were remote-controlling full-sized tanks in the 40s, these techs should be obvious by now.

I have been working for a defense project about instrumenting some armored vehicles with video cameras and monitors. The project was more than 10 years old when I arrived in it. I couldn't help but thinking "bring the prototype to any hackerspace and pay 20k of salary for two weeks of dev and you'll be done."

Let me be the first to say thank god they don't.

We should all count our blessings that hackers tend to be peaceful people by nature. Imagine if we were trying to kill each other.

Well who do you think writes software that controls missiles?

I don't doubt there are some smart people who are trying to figure out how to kill each other. I'm just glad that's not most of us.

Edit: Although I guess I can extend that to human societies in general, not just hackers.

Edit 2: Man, no idea who manages to disagree with that.

I can't remember the exact quote, or even the source, but it was along the lines of "For engineers, the biggest [moral] issue with weapons development is that it is fun".

You can build some really neat things when you have a military R&D budget behind you. The downside is of course that it actively or passively hurt people.

And then there's the whole calculus-of-death/unintended consequence thing, where in theory, a more accurate missile is better for everyone because it reduces collateral damage. But because it kills less innocents, there are fewer qualms about using it more often. This applies strongly to the current UAV trend - You can politically spin (or just bury in accounting) "Ooops, We lost a $xMM drone", versus actual pilots dying.

Yup. I am sure they pitch it as you can build something that saves lives. Little Bob can ride his bicycle safely because of your work. As opposed to you can build something that can kill the enemy in mass in seconds.

There's the old joke: a decent software engineer would never write a destroyLisbon() procedure - he would write a destroyCity() procedure and pass the city as an argument.

> "For engineers, the biggest [moral] issue with weapons development is that it is fun".

This reminded me of a very similar quote from Edward Luttwak about the disconnect between students of war and the people who fight wars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vz1BpRf3Lc&feature=playe...

The entire interview is fascinating and worth the time. It's a bit dated (from 2007), but still has a number of really interesting tidbits throughout.

Yes, lets leave that to the physicists please.

It seems like the truck used in this example costs around 300 usd. If I were a soldier, I think I would not wait for the government to commission a million dollar truck. I would get 3 of these for now.

That toy truck cost 300 fucking dollars??

On the low end it seems.

That's a hobbyist RC car, meant for adults with money, not kids. I have a friend who has a similar model, and he spends time buying new parts and upgrading, like any other hobbyist. It has a gas motor and I suspect this one does as well-it goes as fast as their Humvee on the limiter. A cheap toy store model wouldn't last a week in those conditions and wouldn't hit the speed to make it effective.

At that point you'll have one. Now try to make it it work through extreme weather - hot, cold, pouring rain, etc. Now make it reliable to shock so you aren't fixing thing every 50 miles or so. Ok, write the reference manuals so that 18yr old mechanics how to install, maintain, replace them. You've got some sharp mechanics there, but you have a few dumb ones too. The manual will involve breaking things down to a painful level. Setup logistics for contracts, replace/repair. Oh now setup a production line to make hundreds or thousands. And, by the way, that production line may or may get shut down after the first order. Or you may get another order for exactly the same thing two years later after the last one rolled off the line.

It shouldn't take 10 years, but it isn't a simple trip into a hackerspace either.

Yeah, that's gonna take more than a trip to the hackerspace— maybe a Kickstarter.

Some of the things you're listing are must-haves (secure channel), but most are not. If increasing reliability and versatility makes the drone last 10 times longer and costs 10 times more -- it's not worth it in the long run: it's goal to trigger the first IED it can find, anyway. Even if it's not, it still would be cheaper and easier to buy 10 drones or make them modular enough so anybody with some X-Box experience can snap a new one together in the field. Manuals? -- nah, see the X-Box thing above. Besides, who reads RC cars' manuals? Replace/repair? -- a dumpster full of modular parts is lightyears ahead of any repair technician in the field. Production lines? -- there already exist production lines for RC cars, aren't they?

To put it in the familiar context: what you're describing (and what DoD is used to) is a mainfraime. These guys just made a PC.

I'm no military historian, but there are terrible failure stories for products pushed out before they're ready to the frontlines too. Beauacracy is a waste, but some of those steps seen as wasteful in the DoD procurement process are "scar tissue" from where things went wrong either in the battlefield or, as often, protection against incapable, or worse, fraudulent contractors.

You're right, my post wasn't a list of requirements, just an illustration of some of the things one might end up having to care about when packaging up a military product used in dangerous situations. There's a balance to be made, it should be made on a case by case basis.

some of those steps seen as wasteful in the DoD procurement process are "scar tissue" from where things went wrong either in the battlefield

This is precisely part of the mechanism that causes every military to be well prepared for the previous war but unprepared for the current one.

I propose greater emphasis actual feedback mechanisms based on experience in the field. These can be made to work on timescales of months or weeks. When bureaucracy comes into things, iteration timescales can stretch to years and change can become generational.

The path you mention exists, but not every program is fast tracked - nor should they all be. If you go too fast and mess up, soldiers can die. If you go too slow and mess up, same result.

I get frustrated too at too-slow, too-big companies running projects with billion dollar price tags resulting in no workable product, but I'm not as sure that the solutions are simple. I am sure that without constant oversight from within and without it could be much worse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

> If increasing reliability and versatility makes the drone last 10 times longer and costs 10 times more -- it's not worth it in the long run: it's goal to trigger the first IED it can find, anyway.

Google's approach to building server farms was likewise to buy hardware that was ultra-cheap because it had failed to meet manufacturing specs. Google expected a certain percentage of hard disks, etc., to fail, and simply swapped them out when they did. That resulted in a significantly lower TCO. (So says Steven Levy in in his recent book In the Plex.)

While this is a legit perspective, there is a meaningful difference in that Google can throw out their failed hardware without any real risk of having it return to haunt them, but broken toy trucks means either handing materiel to the enemy or having extra useless weight to carry around.

You might be able to tweak specifics to account for this, but you also might not.

The solution is to have force redundancy and to make each individual element completely disposable (and detonatable).

(and detonatable)

No way terrorist types could misuse that one.

No, I mean if the gear can't be recovered you tell it to self-destruct.

Having lessened reliability is ok until the 2 that fail are the 2 you had in your truck as you're driving down a hostile road. Or if they won't work in the rain, that's ok until you have to go on patrol in the rain. Or if they won't work in harsh desert conditions... oh, wait.

It's similar to saying that having expendable bullets and grenades is OK until you use the last one while still on patrol. Solution: preparing for it by taking more. Knowing that they're designed to fail/be repaired easily changes the approach. The argument I'm trying to make is that it would be cheaper/lighter/more_versatile to get many expandable droids than to get one robust and universal.

Also, highly-adapted droid != highly-adaptable droid. There is no need for an amphibious droid in Afghanistan, just like one doesn't use the same apparel in all climate zones. As long as interface/principles are the same (like a PC), various versions of it can be used in (almost) any environment without extensive re-training.

While I see where that makes sense, the phrase "The perfect is the enemy of the good" comes to mind. The soldier in the field would probably rather have something like this instead of nothing at all or worse, wait (and die) while something "perfect" is developed.

On the bright side, at least they weren't forbidden from using there own solution.

Actually I was very surprised to discover that security was not taken into consideration in the main protocol used by drones operators. There has been stories about Iraq US drones sending or receiving some data unencrypted.

I am not allowed to comment about the specific project I have worked on, but I can tell you that a trip to the hackerspace would have resulted in a better product in that respect too.

I wish I were free to comment on this one too.

Well, one reason is feature creep. More and more spec and features will just get tacked on (doesn't matter if it's suppose to be disposable).

Agree with the first part. However, I think that as long as you were fairly firm that you were only interested in building technology that saved lives (no RC toys with guns on them), I would not feel guilty in the slightest. After all, this truck can't really be used to hurt anyone, just save lives.

It absolutely can be. The XM-7 Spider is basically the same thing, except over secured remote control, and it holds munitions instead of video cameras. It's pretty difficult to build technology that only saves lives.

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell." - Bhuddist Proverb, via Feynman on whether science can be good or bad

It could be used to scout targets.

Just tie some explosives to it, like the RC-XD (explosive device) in Modern Warfare 2.

You beat me to the punch, but it was actually Call of Duty Black Ops. :)

Any device designed to operate in a war zone is an implicit support of the activity. Even life-saving devices. If you made bullet-proof jackets and sold them to the US military, you are supporting the military. You may even be impacting the outcome of an engagement, or influencing the endgame.

If the truck did not exist, 6 US soldiers would likely be dead. The insurgents would probably prefer this. Because the truck existed, the soldiers may now go on to fulfill their missions, which may result in insurgents being killed.

Basically, war is an ugly thing. Don't expect to get involved without getting a little dirty.

P.S. In the interest of transparency, I am an American and a strong supporter of the US military. I have family currently serving, and I'm glad that there was a device like the truck that saved lives.

I was going to reply, but dkokelly below summed up my thoughts exactly. By saving the lives of our soldiers, there is a very real chance that they will go on to take the lives of some enemy soldiers in the future. So, doing any business with the DoD you have to think about the possibility that your products will either directly or indirectly cause the loss of human life. Whether you agree with the mission or support the troops or not, some people don't like selling products that cause the indirect loss of human life.

I think it's because this solution is pretty specific to the region. The toy truck works on sandy roads in the middle east. If the roads were muddy or large gravel the toy would get stuck. The DoD would probably have requirements for this to work in multiple terrains.

Having different solutions for different terrains would become a logistics problem. The DoD already has enough problems getting equipment like AA batteries to the correct locations in sufficent quantity.

They'd sell for a high price not necessarily due to price gouging, but because it costs a lot to sell to the military. The overhead of quality control, support, and all of the bureaucracy involved in dealing with a military customer would dwarf the actual per-unit cost.

That sounds like an incredible waste with the overhead. I absolutely don't understand it. I think people in those power positions really need to stop treating the whole structure like a black box and realize it shouldn't be that damn hard to send some RC cars to Iraq to save lives.

The DOD does take quite a bit of overhead to work with. They also do buy some stuff at pretty competitive prices. As I remember the tent contracts were actually pretty reasonable compared to what commercial 30-man tents cost (actually less than quite a few).

// Dad used to work for place that made tents and bags for DOD

The DoD is the ultimate Waterfall Method practitioner.

1 guy w/ a rigged RC truck bears no liability. A defense contractor shipping these devices will have a team of lawyers chasing them around if it fails to find a bomb that kills someone.

Great the legal environment we have created for ourselves prevents effective tools to be available to our troops.

I guess individual Americans are going to have to step up and fill the gap since contractors may not be willing, at low cost, to assume the liability.

I'd happily pay $500 plus the shipping to Afghanistan if it helps soldiers do their jobs faster and safer. I'm sure that I am not the only one.

You are off by at least an order of magnitude in your price estimates, milspec rugged robots are expensive but on the order of $30,000 - $100,000 each not $1 million. Now those are complex systems with articulated arms, complex comms, and full control station style remote. If the military spec'd out a simple system, like the one in this article, it would cost much less. An existing contractor like iRobot would be perfectly capable of producing it at a low cost. They make the existing pack bots used by the military as well as cheaper consumer grade robots like the Roomba.

I totally agree. Here's the Packbot from iRobot who make Roomba:

http://www.irobot.com/gi/ground/510_PackBot

They're slow. The full military version is $120K but simple versions are half that.

Another analogy is the Firstlook:

http://www.irobot.com/gi/ground/110_FirstLook/

(There's a nice video).

Also commercially available:

http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-talon.htm http://www.qinetiq-na.com/products-dragon-runner.htm

All but the FirstLook, which is new, are in routine use.

The article is sensationalist by not saying that.

This is true (it would probably be more like $100k but it would still seem absurd) but the DOD would control the entire supply chain and intimately know the specs and capabilities of every part.

What if the military came to depend on these and showed up at the toy store only to find the asian manufacturer discontinued that model and replaced it with a weaker one with a remote that interfered with the wireless cameras you were using?

Some of whats bought for that absurd seeming price is expertise and most importantly repeatability.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I appreciate a good hack. On the other hand, if it's going to be used day in and day out to save lives, a certain amount of quality and versatility is needed so that you can rely on it. If every scout team uses a two foot tall RC car, bomb trip wires go up to 3 feet above ground, or they quit using trip wires and switch to magnetic induction coils like the trip lights for stop lights, or speed bumps that the car can't handle get built all over, or patrols can't safely go out on rainy days when the streets are muddy. I worry that this only works well when it's a disposable individual hack used as an additional precaution, not as a standard issue primary first line of defense.

That's a good point. I'd say that the minimum to get through mud for a serious vehicle is something around the size of a small ATV, at which point you are talking about a completely different vehicle. This really only works on dry or paved roads.

Anything that disrupts the enemy's tactics could probably be considered valuable. Induction loops would be harder to build, transport and disguise vs a spool of piano wire and a friction fuze.

The tricky part is making sure it doesn't lull the people using it into a false sense of security. Once you identify the new tactic, you can adapt to it; once they start using magnetic triggers, you send your little RC car out with a big Neodymium magnet mounted on it or whatever.

What you are saying applies to all tactics, which always lead to counter-tactics, etc. It's always more advantageous for everyone to have their own home-brewed methods, because it's harder to counter. It's like in evolution; successful methods become victims of their own success in that there is now more selection pressure on countermeasures. It is, after all, called an arms-race for a reason.

I remember reading an article in the UK edition of Wired about IEDs. Soldiers soon realised that roadside bombs were heat-detecting - as soon as the heat being given off from a truck driving past was detected, these IEDs would launch straight into the truck, killing soldiers on several occasions.

One morning a soldier had a brainwave and took a long metal pole and gaffer-taped it to the front of the truck. On the front of this he attached a toaster that he rigged to be 'always on'.

This heated toaster, protruding three meters forwards, was enough to trick roadside bombs of this kind for months afterwards. They would fire in completely the wrong direction.

These two anecdotes suggest that we should teach a hacker mentality to soldiers. Or have a hacker (or a group of hackers) with each unit where they identify problems, experiment, and implement solutions. Hopefully the military would place more value on the intelligence and creativity of the common soldier and invest more in order to nurture it.

It's already being taught. It's called maneuver warfare and the marines practice it. Read MCDP-1.

Further reading is a guy named John Boyd who developed this stuff (along with the f15, f16, f18, a10 and first iraq invasion) from the 60's through the 90's.

People, ideas, hardware. In that order.

We should teach the hacker mentality to everyone.

The first bomb disposal robot was built from a powered wheelbarrow[1] controlled remotely by a length of string. Within three weeks it was being used in action in Northern Ireland and within months had become one of the most valuable tools for ordnance officers serving there. There's a long military tradition of improvisation and invention.

[1]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6...

It's a good story but I really, really hate auto playing videos.

Edit: "video ads" -> "videos" I don't like either one.

I have Flashblock and I didn't see any ads.

I thought the same thing, but if you wait around, you'll see that the ad is a pre-roll to a TV news story about the Afghanistan story. So it's not really an auto-playing ad, it's an auto-playing news video with an ad in the front. Still annoying.

Fwiw, I agree with you.

So I wondered why I didn't get an autoplay story, then I realized it's on ABC and last week I had ad block plus create an easy filter to get rid of their videos entirely. As far as I can tell, losing ABC videos is just not a loss, and it leaves a static jpg that ABC presents to browsers that can't do video.

What I've been curious about is can sites tell when someone has started playing a video, but clicked away from their precious video after a second or two?

So, I am excited about this, but there is a major problem with thinking that this could be scaled up without increasing the cost.

What happens when we have hundreds of these things out there, and insurgents wise up to them? I can imagine the conversation:

"Hey, check it out. Now we can get an X11 receiver and we can watch the video feed from all the nearby US troops' scout drones. Now we just wait for a drone to come into range and we can use remote detonators instead of trip wires."

I think military hardware is way too costly in general, and this RC truck is a cool success story, but scaling it up would only be beneficial in the short term. It is a cat and mouse game. That said, we need more rapid innovations like this to keep our troops safe. Just don't think we can solve all our problems without a lot of engineering.

Solving the eavesdropping problem will require engineering. That said, wasn't there a similar problem with our incredibly expensive predator drones sending the video feeds unencrypted? http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

You could encrypt the video feed.

So...what. The enemy can see where they placed their own bombs? This thing is going to be 100 meters or so (at most) away from a humvee with people in it.

That was the same argument, by the way, for why it didn't matter that the drone feeds were non-encrypted. The enemy already knows where they are, they already know that the drone is there, the video feed gets them nothing.

they already know that the drone is there, the video feed gets them nothing

The video feed lets them know when and where we are looking.

The aerial drones are not immediately near ground troops. A little RC truck would never be very far from them. Therefore, by picking up video signals from the cheap recon device, combatants could know where the ground troops are going to be very soon and from what direction they're coming.

Furthermore, picking up the source of the RC controller would mean combatants could tell exactly where the troops are. In the case of an aerial drone, piloting happens from an air conditioned trailer, often across the globe. So that's less of an issue.

This is really, really cool. I wonder how much it'd cost to take something like http://micromotorx.com/kids-x-treme-ride-on-cars.html and fit it with cameras and all that. It seems like the larger size and the weight might be able to trigger things that a little RC car wouldn't. Of course, it's significantly more obvious than a little RC car, so it might get attacked separately -- then again, that's valuable info too.

A response to statements such as:

> it shouldn't be that damn hard to send some RC cars to Iraq to save lives

Actually, efficient resource allocation is usually a NP hard problem! It's very computationally complex, and the US Department of Defense is one the largest bureaucracies in the world. From that perspective, and depending on one's expected value for bureaucratic efficiency in relation to size, one could also argue that the efficiency of the DoD is surprisingly good.

What could possibly help the Department of Defense's resource allocation problems for such infantry equipment, and to open up the possibility for more off-the-shelf solutions, is to push acquisition demand down to the squad level as much as possible. You would more or less be giving squad commanders equipment purchasing credits to allocate independently of one another. This would simulate one the best tools currently available for resource allocation, markets.

Also create opportunities for corruption at all levels of the military, instead of just a few. Plus it would open the way to fads and fashions, instead of evidence-based decisions.

Interesting -- I was in the army (Non-US, but allied) years ago, and we were developing a lot of similar technology. RC Cars/Trucks with cameras, guns that shoot around corners, and surveillance balls amongst other things. They were developed for close-quarters combat, clearing rooms, hallways, that sort of thing.

The tech isn't new, but what's interesting I guess is the application they accidentally discovered. Strap a camera on a hardy RC vehicle, and have that be the sweeper in the front of a patrol checking for roadside bombs.

Interesting article, thanks for posting it.

These guy should put this up on kickstarter to raise cash for sending the units as gifts until DoD gets off their ass and actually learns from it!

Of course it's not as tough as it probably should be for all of military due, but the fact that it was still alive from 2007 means it's good enough to start.

PBS has a good documentary called remote control war. It is on netflix, it talks about similar current technologies and those under development. There is also a clip about hackerspaces developing similar devices later in the program.

The book Wired for War is also good.

I have shared this story with some of the Army leaders I work with.

I wonder why the Army doesn’t have stuff like this already, for all the money they spend each year.

For the same reason we're even in an armed conflict going on a decade (Afghanistan)... corruption. We should have declared mission completion long ago.

The purpose of military spending these days has been captured: it is now to transfer wealth from the social security trust fund into the coffers of military contractors and thus their investors.

[OT]

For once, thank you for editorializing the title. Perfect choice of words.

Nice hack, and I'm glad it worked out. Given all the other stuff a soldier carries I assume they don't all want to be toting RC trucks along as well.

That being said, history is full of examples of innovations in tactics on the battlefield becoming tactical doctrine later, the risk is that the last war's tactics won't be as applicable to the current war's tactics.

It would be great if the DoD could move more quickly to adopt working tactics but my friends who work and live in that world are very very much aware of how 'bad' tactics can get a lot of people killed and so there is a very healthy level of risk aversion to changing things too rapidly and without a lot of analysis.

This is an awesome success story and shows once again that given a chance (ie not explicitly banned or thwarted) can-do inventive american individuals will come up with great solutions that work well and save money and lives.

I can't help but move past that and, knowing how corruption, waste and inefficiency work, predict that this device will be banned by higher ups for field use, requiring that devices that cost at least $2 million each and are built by military contractors be used instead. I also predict that the public will be happier and more comfortable paying $2 million through taxes than paying $500 through passing the hat at the county fair, which he points out raised $6.

I'm kind of wondering what would happen to an entrepreneur who started selling these kinds of devices direct to soldiers, through the mail.

For some reason I imagine this story would end in court with a multimillion dollar lawsuit. Does anyone have the knowledge to spek to Estra's question, or know of an example of this? If it's legal I'm sure people are already doing it.

FWIW, I'm skeptical that this would end in a lawsuit.

This reminds me of the time back when I used to post on Something Awful, when SA members put together a fund to buy armor plating for a member who was going to Iraq and his platoon.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/update-from-frontlines....

I'm surprised the reveres isn't true that small RC planes or land vehicles are not being used as unmanned bomb delivery devices by the Taliban.

If this were to happen I'd guess Libyan rebels would do it since I see a lot of fabrication of weapons by them.

The defense is the same as cellphone-triggered bombs: jam RF when moving in unfriendly territory.

I'm surprised the reveres isn't true that small RC planes or land vehicles...

I just had an image of Paul Revere warning the Massachusetts countryside the British are Coming with an RC 4x4 with a speaker stuck on it.

Ha! I deserve that, typos bug me.

Hackers, saving lives without moving their asses away from the PC.

I hate upvoting stories like these, because the HN comments are always going to be pure crap, but oh well.

Also, fuck video ads.

Why will the comments be pure crap?

I assume he was anticipating anti-military/war discussion.

Well, it's stereotypical for both hackers and hippies to have scruffy facial hair and hygiene problems, so I guess I can see how one might mix them up.

Hackers don't hug their computers, though.

At least, not when anyone else is looking.

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