3 ms·

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

by 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.

3 ms·

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

by elihu 11y ago

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.