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
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.
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.
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