NASA Building Air Traffic Control System For Drones

An anonymous reader writes: Last week, The Guardian got its hands on documents indicating NASA would be working with Verizon to monitor civilian and commercial drones around the U.S. using phone network towers. Now, NASA has confirmed its plans for a drone traffic control system, saying that it wants to help "define" this new generation of aviation. They are testing ways of communicating with drones in flight, both for providing helpful information to drones and collecting information about them. For example, the ATC system could send real-time weather updates to the drones, and inform them of no-fly zones. It could also monitor a drone's battery life and compare its flight path to surrounding terrain. NASA has gathered over 100 organizations to contribute to this project, and they're looking for more. "One of the biggest challenges to integrating UAS into the national airspace beyond line of sight is developing a system that enables the aircraft to see and be seen by other aircraft." This is where the involvement of Verizon and other telecoms is important. NASA is holding a convention next month to develop the idea further.

Comments

Control Looking for a Problem

[bill_mcgonigle]

These NASA plans are practically useless and far more likely to hinder the industry than do it any good. Every one of these devices will have a GPS receiver on it, and a terrain map is $10 to integrate. NASA doesn't need to unicast this information - that's just a waste of bandwidth. Any hardware that NASA might want to mandate is already going to be too expensive in terms of components and power consumption to do better than a cellular Internet connection (since they're planning to use Verizon towers anyway) which is already commoditized and ridiculously power-optimized. The aerobots can easily do ad-hoc networking to find their neighbors and avoid collisions - an industry working group is going to have way more information about what those requirements are than NASA might. Aerobot operators have tremendous incentives to not lose their craft, and their insurance carriers will double-down on that; the inclusion of a $5 802.11 radio to handle an ipv6 mesh network in the sky isn't going to ruffle anybody's feathers there.

*Maybe* NASA could be given the job of putting up a web service to keep no-fly zones updated. We'd have to trust their ability to maintain that securely.

The bureaucrats' urge to control everything whether it will help or not ought to be recognized as a treatable mental illness.