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To me this is similar to old red flag laws requiring a motor vehicle to be preceded by a person waving a red flag. For fully autonomous vehicles, these US regu

To me this is similar to old red flag laws requiring a motor vehicle to be preceded by a person waving a red flag. For fully autonomous vehicles, these US regulations appear to be a barrier. How could merchants pursue autonomous drone delivery? Perhaps some other jurisdictions, where entrepreneurs have more freedom to innovate with this tech - will show the way.

ghaff 12y ago
Seriously? There's nothing to keep companies from working to figure out what the challenges/requirements/etc. are for doing home delivery at some point. I also suspect it is quite a long way away and, in the meantime, I don't want to see random companies going all move fast and break things with heavy objects flying through the air above people and in controlled airspaces.
- SlipperySlope 12y ago
  Venture capitalists and self funded R&D want rosy market projections. Sadly, based on sentiment from USA residents, like yours I suppose, I predict the USA is going to lead with military applications only for UAVs.
  - eropple 12y ago
    > Venture capitalists and self funded R&D want rosy market projections. I want people to not die because somebody "moved fast and broke something."
    - SlipperySlope 12y ago
      I wonder how many lives would be lost due to failing drones vs lives saved by the timely delivery of medications/defribillators by waypoint-following autonomous air vehicles. The data will most certainly come either from US military usage or from commercial usage outside the USA. Sad.
      - eropple 12y ago
        There's nothing stopping your hypothetical company from getting FAA permission for a trial, even in an urban area. Yes, it requires one of those "lawyers", and requires you to have more of a plan than just "eh fuck it, light it up," but those are features, not bugs. But nobody's going to be prevented from doing even urban-scale testing if they are actually taking it seriously and involving the communities they wish to experiment within. There's a reason these rules look so much like radio regulations: because screwing it up hurts everyone, so it behooves us not to screw up. Doing dangerous things requires buy-in from more than just your shareholders. And stop with the "oh, woe is us" stuff. It's shitty rhetoric and it doesn't work.
        SlipperySlope 12y ago
        Well we are talking past each other. I predict that timely delivery of life saving medications and medical devices will first happen outside of the USA, in jurisdictions favoring UAV innovation. http://www.uasvision.com/2015/02/10/japan-tests-drone-delivery-to-islands/ http://www.uasvision.com/2015/02/10/japan-tests-drone-delive... http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0209/c98649-8847897.html http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0209/c98649-8847897.html And I predict that the in the USA, the military will lead the way with regard to autonomous air vehicle technology for delivery because not the FAA, nor local equivalents, will constrain them where battles are happening. http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/blog/intercepts/2015/01/02/darpa-drones-intercepts/21196989/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/blog/intercept...
cmurf 12y ago
Autonomous drone delivery requires something analogous to "positive control" used in the existing air traffic control system, yet none of that infrastructure exists. Neither primary nor secondary radar used for aircraft today will work on UASs, so how are they going to be tracked and separation ensured? If it's a decentralized system along the lines of TCAS, that implies some industry agreed upon spec, whether it's active/passive sensing, or whether there's actually communication between UAS's. Any communication probably needs to be cryptographically signed for validation, probably shouldn't be encrypted however so it's transparent. Clearly it has to go beyond existing technologies for aircraft if there will be no role for air traffic control. A whole separate set of expectations and standards for how various kinds of systems failures are to be treated, how does an autonomous UAS determine an emergency, how does it declare one (to reserve a different section of airspace than on its prior "plan" in order to avoid a worse accident), how does it actually perform an emergency landing? Some of these things could be proprietary but other things need to be openly published, namely the spec, the standard, and the metric for performance. We can't just say "oh, no pilot, rules go out the window" as if everything we've learned about flight safety doesn't apply at all to UASs. No, there's actually a lot of adaptation that needs to be done. A whole lot.
- SlipperySlope 12y ago
  Yep. The US military and their civilian/academic researchers are working on this as part of the future battlespace. The 2015 US military budget has $700 million for drone procurement and R&D.

ghaff 12y ago

Seriously? There's nothing to keep companies from working to figure out what the challenges/requirements/etc. are for doing home delivery at some point. I also suspect it is quite a long way away and, in the meantime, I don't want to see random companies going all move fast and break things with heavy objects flying through the air above people and in controlled airspaces.

SlipperySlope 12y ago
Venture capitalists and self funded R&D want rosy market projections. Sadly, based on sentiment from USA residents, like yours I suppose, I predict the USA is going to lead with military applications only for UAVs.
- eropple 12y ago
  > Venture capitalists and self funded R&D want rosy market projections. I want people to not die because somebody "moved fast and broke something."
  - SlipperySlope 12y ago
    I wonder how many lives would be lost due to failing drones vs lives saved by the timely delivery of medications/defribillators by waypoint-following autonomous air vehicles. The data will most certainly come either from US military usage or from commercial usage outside the USA. Sad.
    - eropple 12y ago
      There's nothing stopping your hypothetical company from getting FAA permission for a trial, even in an urban area. Yes, it requires one of those "lawyers", and requires you to have more of a plan than just "eh fuck it, light it up," but those are features, not bugs. But nobody's going to be prevented from doing even urban-scale testing if they are actually taking it seriously and involving the communities they wish to experiment within. There's a reason these rules look so much like radio regulations: because screwing it up hurts everyone, so it behooves us not to screw up. Doing dangerous things requires buy-in from more than just your shareholders. And stop with the "oh, woe is us" stuff. It's shitty rhetoric and it doesn't work.
      - SlipperySlope 12y ago
        Well we are talking past each other. I predict that timely delivery of life saving medications and medical devices will first happen outside of the USA, in jurisdictions favoring UAV innovation. http://www.uasvision.com/2015/02/10/japan-tests-drone-delivery-to-islands/ http://www.uasvision.com/2015/02/10/japan-tests-drone-delive... http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0209/c98649-8847897.html http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0209/c98649-8847897.html And I predict that the in the USA, the military will lead the way with regard to autonomous air vehicle technology for delivery because not the FAA, nor local equivalents, will constrain them where battles are happening. http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/blog/intercepts/2015/01/02/darpa-drones-intercepts/21196989/ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense-news/blog/intercept...

cmurf 12y ago

Autonomous drone delivery requires something analogous to "positive control" used in the existing air traffic control system, yet none of that infrastructure exists. Neither primary nor secondary radar used for aircraft today will work on UASs, so how are they going to be tracked and separation ensured? If it's a decentralized system along the lines of TCAS, that implies some industry agreed upon spec, whether it's active/passive sensing, or whether there's actually communication between UAS's. Any communication probably needs to be cryptographically signed for validation, probably shouldn't be encrypted however so it's transparent. Clearly it has to go beyond existing technologies for aircraft if there will be no role for air traffic control. A whole separate set of expectations and standards for how various kinds of systems failures are to be treated, how does an autonomous UAS determine an emergency, how does it declare one (to reserve a different section of airspace than on its prior "plan" in order to avoid a worse accident), how does it actually perform an emergency landing? Some of these things could be proprietary but other things need to be openly published, namely the spec, the standard, and the metric for performance. We can't just say "oh, no pilot, rules go out the window" as if everything we've learned about flight safety doesn't apply at all to UASs. No, there's actually a lot of adaptation that needs to be done. A whole lot.

SlipperySlope 12y ago
Yep. The US military and their civilian/academic researchers are working on this as part of the future battlespace. The 2015 US military budget has $700 million for drone procurement and R&D.