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From the Makani FAQ: "Energy kites are also tested on sites that are far away from people, infrastructure and airplane flight paths." Makes me wonder how hard

From the Makani FAQ: "Energy kites are also tested on sites that are far away from people, infrastructure and airplane flight paths." Makes me wonder how hard it is going to be in the future to manage a system in which there are a bunch of drones (some guided by humans, most not) and systems like Makani. Are we going to have to re-think the standards we currently have to ensure that flying things don't hit other flying things? Not a rhetorical question -- would love to hear from someone whose job involves thinking about this question rigorously.

andreyf 11y ago
That's what regulators do: https://www.faa.gov/uas/ https://www.faa.gov/uas/
jacquesm 11y ago
Makani is tethered and - for now - apparently limited to about 250 meters, the height of a tall building.
- mikeyouse 11y ago
  As a better comparison, the Transamerica Building in SF is 260M tall -- so more like the height of a very tall building..
elihu 11y ago
I think the way this all going to work in the end is that people will buy and sell right-of-ways in 3-dimensional space for their drones. There will be public right-of-ways for drones like there are public roads, and flight plans will be submitted electronically to the FAA for approval before any drone enters the public right-of-way. Energy kites should be pretty easy to deal with unless they're tethered within range of competing energy kites or things they could damage if they crashed.
- brianwawok 11y ago
  Why not use what we already have? I.e. what if beyond every current road was a drone-zone from 300-500 feet up. Then we have drones not over private property, and easy to avoid this kind of thing... (But then routes get way less direct)
  - elihu 11y ago
    That does make sense and I think that's what regulators may do in some cases. However, there is a safety risk having drones flying over busy streets; if one were to fall out of the sky, it could cause a traffic accident as cars swerve out of its way. (There really aren't any truly safe places for a drone to fly, as they could always crash into some unfortunate bystander. However, I think over roads would be higher risk than most.) I think these sorts of decisions are going to have to be made on a case-by-case basis, which means extending the notion of right-of-way into three dimensions and creating a machine-readable national database that can be easily queried by the drones themselves to determine if they're somewhere they're allowed to be. I expect these right-of-ways will, in some cases, need to be modified on-the-fly in response to things like forest fires, public events, and various kinds of emergencies. So, I don't think that static heuristics like "all roads have a drone right-of-way above them" will work well in the long run.

andreyf 11y ago

That's what regulators do: https://www.faa.gov/uas/ https://www.faa.gov/uas/

jacquesm 11y ago

Makani is tethered and - for now - apparently limited to about 250 meters, the height of a tall building.

mikeyouse 11y ago
As a better comparison, the Transamerica Building in SF is 260M tall -- so more like the height of a very tall building..

elihu 11y ago

I think the way this all going to work in the end is that people will buy and sell right-of-ways in 3-dimensional space for their drones. There will be public right-of-ways for drones like there are public roads, and flight plans will be submitted electronically to the FAA for approval before any drone enters the public right-of-way. Energy kites should be pretty easy to deal with unless they're tethered within range of competing energy kites or things they could damage if they crashed.

brianwawok 11y ago
Why not use what we already have? I.e. what if beyond every current road was a drone-zone from 300-500 feet up. Then we have drones not over private property, and easy to avoid this kind of thing... (But then routes get way less direct)
- elihu 11y ago
  That does make sense and I think that's what regulators may do in some cases. However, there is a safety risk having drones flying over busy streets; if one were to fall out of the sky, it could cause a traffic accident as cars swerve out of its way. (There really aren't any truly safe places for a drone to fly, as they could always crash into some unfortunate bystander. However, I think over roads would be higher risk than most.) I think these sorts of decisions are going to have to be made on a case-by-case basis, which means extending the notion of right-of-way into three dimensions and creating a machine-readable national database that can be easily queried by the drones themselves to determine if they're somewhere they're allowed to be. I expect these right-of-ways will, in some cases, need to be modified on-the-fly in response to things like forest fires, public events, and various kinds of emergencies. So, I don't think that static heuristics like "all roads have a drone right-of-way above them" will work well in the long run.