Will we deregulate drones? Should we? When might that become possible?:
There are very few drones over our cities. Commercial interests are not allowed to fly overhead. Nor most local governments. Hobbyists can, if they keep their drones under 400 feet. And the skies will eventually open up to everyone. “Ironically, my nine-year-old can fly drones, but the police department can’t.” Anderson says.
The problem is that our airspace is governed by a policy called sense-and-avoid. Flying vehicle control systems — be they people or computers — are ultimately responsible for avoiding other vehicles. And today’s drones, as a rule, have no facility to make them aware of other aircraft.
Anderson says there is still a long way to go when it comes to autonomous vehicles. The videos we’ve seen of quadcopters flying through tiny slits or playing instruments are taken in highly-controlled environments, he says.
Out in the real world, GPS and wind leads to much less precise positioning.
Here is more. I enjoy following @GrishinRobotics on Twitter.
Regulating drones is the same as regulating the airwaves or airspace…recall the radio wars of the turn of the last century… Armstrong had to battle the vested interests of RCA and David Sarnoff (Armstrong took it very personally unfortunately). I say regulate for certain types of drones not considered hobbies and no drones over playgrounds (since they can easily crash). Or, if no regulation allow one to sue easily for nuisance (with a special expedited ‘small claims’ or ‘small aircraft’ court)
It’ll be interesting to see how the regulation of drones proceeds. The technology’s already out there to do all sorts of interesting things with all sorts of drones – fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and multi-rotors – and between hobbyist CNC machines, microprocessors and rapid prototypers it’s hard to get much of a handle on how far and how fast the technology will develop.
HobbyKing’s Beer Challenge has multi-rotors lifting over a hundred pounds and someone else has gotten a man-carrying multi-rotor off the ground.
The thing about multi-rotors is that they have all the advantages of helicopters with none of the mechanical complexity which is what makes helicopters so expensive. That simplicity will drive development of the type and there are all sorts of interesting uses for the aircraft. This time next year should see the delivery of a few of those interesting possibilities.
Am I the only one who is damned happy that “There are very few drones over our cities”? The alternative sounds like how one might be tortured in hell.
I have filed for air rights extending 20 miles over my house,
so if you enter my airspace,
you will be shot down by my homemade antiaircraft
and anti-drone missile defense system
with parts supplied by the manufacturer of your drone system.
For every measure, there is a countermeasure.
And someone willing to sell it to you.
How loud are these drones, anyway? Because if they are basically flying leaf blowers, I’m gonna buy me some of them anti-drone missiles.
Good luck with that Bill. The Taliban have mostly found out that shootouts with UAV that can put a missile on your belt buckle before you see or hear them tend to go badly
Widespread use of drones will mean the end of over-the-air television. (Not that it wasn’t already doomed because of the profligate waste of bandwidth.) Drones cut up digital TV reception. If it were analog TV, the picture would suffer some interference, but it would still be watchable.
I remember analog TV. The colors were so beautiful, and the sound was just like being there. You kids don’t know what you’re missing.
It’s such a shame that we have to get by with HD TV and surround sound.
As long as you lived right down the street from the antenna. If you lived more than a couple of miles away, it was ghastly.
“Ironically, my nine-year-old can fly drones, but the police department can’t”
This is incorrect. The houston police department already flies drones.
It’s very misleading to say that hobbyists can fly these if they stay under 400 feet. They must also have the aircraft in view, with an operator who can take over if the person flying loses control for some reason. Furthermore, if they fly over someone’s property without permission they are trespassing. Finally, the legal status of the 400-foot “rule” is unclear: it may apply only within three miles of an airport, and it may just be a “guideline,” rather than a rule, or maybe not even that: it could be just a description of what’s “typical” for models. We’ll know more fairly soon, when the FAA files its notice of proposed rulemaking.
For what it’s worth based on a conversation I had with a drone swarm programmer, drones don’t have enough battery life to serve as general-purpose delivery vehicles ala Tacocopter ( http://tacocopter.com/ ). He was of the opinion the precision-targeted parafoils would be a much better choice for cargo delivery, since a number of them could be dropped from a much larger drone without needing to quickly return to base. At current outdoor quadrocopter speeds( ~30 mph ) and battery life (~ 20 minutes ), that’s about a 10 mile maximum range for a quadrocopter. With parafoils dropped from a larger drone airplane, you might get more like a 50-80 mile range from the base airport.
Do they have to be battery powered? Military drones use fuel, right?
The problem with using gas engines on the drones is that they pretty much have to be larger and heavier, which means burning even more fuel. It makes the idea less economical. Also you get engine noise, which will annoy your neighbors and make them want to shut you down.
NASA has already developed solar-powered drones and light aircraft: see here. These things are too large and expensive for hobbyists right now but 10 years from now, who knows?
I put ‘drones over cities’ into the same category as the Segway — a seemingly cool technological solution searching vainly for a problem. Messages can obviously be sent more efficiently electronically. Goods that are either heavy or not time-sensitive are deliverable much more cost-effectively by truck (not to mention the danger aspect of drones flying heavy items around above a densely populated city). So you’re left with delivering lightweight, time-sensitive goods. E.G. tacos. But how do you deliver a taco by quadrocopter to an office worker? How does the taco stay dry in the rain, warm in the winter, or stay on course in heavy winds? Does the quadrocopter fly in through the front door and hover while it rides up the elevator? Well, ok then, how about surveillance? Maybe there’s a niche. But most surveillance will still be done by much cheaper and easier to operate fixed location cameras (which can operate in all weather conditions).
The most logical niche seems to be drone taxis. If you already aren’t allowed to crash carrying a taco, you could carry people. People are not heavy and always time sensitive.
I’d say they replace bike messengers in big cities – fly 2-3 stories up with relatively lightweight parcels. If you give them a “Outta my way, I’m a drone, muthaf@#&!” attitude and full-rotor tattoos they’ll fit right in.
It’s a lot easier to navigate a 2 dimensional surface than a 3 dimensional one, and fighting gravity requires a lot of energy. A ‘drone taxi’ is most likely going to evolve from Google’s driverless cars and not flying drones. Besides once you’re carrying people you’re basically on the scale of a helicopter. At that level what is the economic value of making it a drone helicopter? The labor cost of a human pilot?
“Will it be drones that end the great stagnation?”
No, we are at the point where the excess GDP gains from new technologies end up being extracted by incumbents.
The first sentence of this post is misleading. Drones are essentially deregulated. There are no laws against commercial drones today. The ‘regulations’ cited are only suggestions from the FAA (we’ve been thru this before with Tacocopter where I challenged people to actually produce the so-called regulations inhibiting the innovations).
The issue of whether or not drones should be required to sense and avoid other aircraft is not quite an issue of regulation but market structure. Consider NYC and the Empire State Building and the new Freedom Tower being finished up now. Imagine a virtual ‘tube’ of airspace between them. You could say that the ‘tube’ is property of the drone and no other drone or manned plane may fly into it….likewise drones flying in their tube have to have provisions to make a safe ‘crash landing’ should some mechanical failure make it impossible to stay in their tube.
What this is describing is not ‘deregulation’ but a different set of property rights. The ‘tubes’ would essentially become like broadcast frequencies. This scheme, though, would have to be enforced through a healthy dose of government regulation as opposed to an ‘open sky’ type of system where drones could fly more or less wherever they want provided they keep out of the way of people, aircrafts, buildings and each other.
The model(s) presented by Tyler in these posts are, I think, backwards. Gov’t doesn’t lift regulations thereby spurring the innovation, instead the market innovates which drives regulation. Case in point, broadcast frequencies. 150 years ago anyone could have built a radio and broadcasting anything they wanted. Only later did regulation start getting introduced as an actual working business that was more than just hobbiests took shape.
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