14 DAY TRIAL // The US Navy has unveiled a new type of autonomous vehicles, called Swarmboats. These are actually small patrol boats or unmanned surface vehicles (USV) and they seem to be controlled by using a weird combination of Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
The US Air Force has the drones, but now the US Navy has autonomous boats that can steer themselves, patrol a zone, and take a hostile posture, whatever that means. It was just a matter of time until someone thought of having some kind of drones that could guard a fleet on the water. The US Navy was happy to oblige.
This is the first time when a working prototype of this kind has been shown to work. It's not something that's still being worked on, but something that has been completed and is ready for deployment. And, to top it all off, the US Navy is using Ubuntu.
Does Ubuntu running in a Windows virtual machine count?
The US Navy put together an exercise to show what the new Swarmboats can do, and the new autonomous vehicles were put to the test on the James River in Virginia, US.
"The technology-called CARACaS (Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing)-is under development by ONR (Office of Naval Research), and can be put into a transportable kit and installed on almost any boat. It allows boats to operate autonomously, without a Sailor physically needing to be at the controls-including operating in sync with other unmanned vessels; choosing their own routes; swarming to interdict enemy vessels; and escorting/protecting naval assets," reads the announcement made by the US Navy.
If you take a closer look at the video provided by the US Navy, you will notice that they are using Ubuntu to control the Swarmboats. The strange thing is that Ubuntu is running in a virtual machine on a Windows 7 system. There are a couple of possible explanations for this. The software that controls the boats can only run on Linux or it's a security issue that needs to be addressed.
In any case, it seems that the Office of Naval Research is populated with a bunch of Linux geeks that managed to convince their superiors that Ubuntu and Linux were the way to go. That also means that Ubuntu is probably present in lots of other projects that don't get to be presented on YouTube because they are highly classified.
