Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Proposes Dedicated Airspace For Drones
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has published two new position papers which lay out its vision for future drone regulation. Under Amazon's plan, altitudes under 200ft would be reserved for basic hobbyist drones and those used for things like videography and inspection. Altitudes between 200ft and 400ft would be designated for "well-equipped vehicles" capable of operating autonomously out of line of sight. They would need sophisticated GPS tracking, a stable data uplink, communications capabilities with other drones, and sensors to avoid collisions. This, of course, is where Amazon would want to operate its drone delivery fleet. From 400ft to 500ft would be a no-fly zone buffer between the drone airspace and integrated airspace. Amazon's plan also makes room for "predefined low-risk areas," where hobbyists and other low-tech drones can fly higher than the 200ft ceiling. "Additionally, it is Amazon's view that air traffic management operations should follow a 'managed by exception' approach. This means operators are always aware of what the fleet is doing, yet they only intervene in significant off-nominal cases."
That all sounds great, except that helicopter often operate at less than 500 feet above the ground.
What happens when EMS is flying at 300ft and crashes into their delivery drone?
What about law enforcement? Powerline and pipeline patrol? Aerial photography?
All of these things can and do happen at less than 500ft above the ground.
In the North East, they even harvest Christmas Trees off the side of the mountain using helicopters, and that is well under 500ft.
Government bashes free speech, and then some private agent comes with the wonderful idea of "free speech zone".
I hate what the US have become, it is such that everything is considered "potentially dangerous", and thus need to be banned and/or operate in "controlled" area. Drones accident will happen, just the same way car accident happens, planes accident happens, or even accidental discharge happen (gun are as much subject to mechanical failure as anything else).
100 feet of buffer is inadequate. How the hell do you measure your AGL when you're flying? You either use a radar altimeter ($25K installed on an airplane worth $20K) or you use the baro altimeter, which has an acceptable calibration error, plus the local altimeter setting (atmospheric pressure) which has an error band, and there's error because you're not right over the reporting station. 1000' is the minimum instrument separation. Bezos just wants to steal a band of airspace. I say give him 0' to 10' AGL, just like a UPS truck.
No, but how bout you give him 20-30' so long as he stays over a road, and limit windspeed and weather conditions he can operate in? Sink a billion or so into detecting wires and other obstacles over roadways. Now you've got a second level road and he's flying higher than vehicles but lower than aerial vehicles. It's inefficient compared to full use of airspace but still faster than regular traffic.
The flaws in height-based segmentation of airspace are obvious: you've got to cross through the lower, unregulated height zones to get to the other zones! What zones to they recommend reserving for pistol-equipped drones?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How about over ISIS
Table-ized A.I.
This is another in a long line of corporate taking.
They want to take a huge swath of public space (the space between 200 and 400 feet across the ENTIRE UNITED STATES) for free, for their benefit and the benefit of the rich who can afford to pay for this-hour delivery, and deliver nothing back to the vast majority of the population.
screw'em
And the worms ate into his brain.
The whole point of this, though, is integrating something new that works radically differently from existing aircraft. If other technological mechanisms can provide sufficient accuracy, why can't they be used?
It's not like they need to solely rely on AGPS either. Consumer IMUs have been advancing at a rapid pace (there's huge amounts of money being dumped in them due to gaming, VR, and mobile phones), and are capable of high accuracy when combined with an external reference. You can also use laser ranging, which is also very cheap these days (my robotic vacuum cleaner has a LIDAR turret on it, although the range would be less than the few hundred feet required here). If you know where you are, and you know the height above sea level at that location, and you know how far you are from the ground...
There are many tough problems to solve to make what Amazon is proposing practical, but accurately figuring out your altitude a few hundred feet from the ground is certainly not insoluble (or even particularly difficult). There are many things you can do to determine altitude at 300 feet than aren't possible at 30,000 feet.
Baro measurements are accurate to about 5' at these altitudes. A $0.20 chip and $2000 for the lawyers to haggle over the language you have to click through when you set it up in the plane.
I fly to 6000' with rockets and you know who the idiots are? The pilots. We put out a NOTAM with our coordinates and recovery space, notify all local FAA towers and get legal waivers for all flights. And in the middle of nowhere, where we fly, we get no less than 4 light aircraft fly right overhead at less than 1000' - some even doing multiple passes - just to see what we're doing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Acceptable margin of error for the identified height detection methods, whereas you could use simpler height detection methods if you were closer to the ground.
As to complex ideas, I fully expect there are lots of legitimate challenges to my proposal that may make it unworkable or that may challenge existing assumptions. That's fine; that's why we propose ideas. So other smart people can tear them down and propose *better* ideas. Or can have their assumptions challenged, like asking questions about how we tell how high off the ground something is.
There is no way it makes sense to let private drones go over Manhattan and not be mostly bound to roads, for example. Medium-sized cities likewise might be able to accommodate a drone infrastructure bound to roads but should probably not be dealing with drones in free-flight. Of course, you might also be able to have drones hook into a cable system once they reach a certain area...
I'm proposing that the drones be equipped with this to keep them out of the buffer area, not that the actual airplanes. Airplanes operating over cities are already required to operate 1,000 feet above the highest nearby obstacles, placing them far above any drones. Helicopters would be another story, but they are allowed to operate under your proposed 10 foot cap, so that's kind of already a thing.
How will this work? At the moment I have an intelligent (more or less) human delivery system and even that one is not capable of reading the instructions at the door about where to deposit the package when nobody is present.
(I have 'no-signing needed' contracts with all the delivery companies)
How about if Amazon first would get the "world wide web" thingie right and deliver every item to every country, my local post administration (Luxembourg) has a lucrative automatic system going on where packets for Luxembourg are delivered to a company in a border town in Germany and France and then sent by truck for 5€ to my local post box the very same day. You just register at their website.
For all those hundreds of thousands of vendors that are apparently unable to figure out the shipping costs to deliver outside Germany or France. The other Amazon countries don't seem to have that problem.
This is in some ways similar to what happened to the radio spectrum. Large swaths are only licensed to commercial enterprises to broadcast trash while amateurs got squeezed into narrow slices here and there. No. Reserve 200-300 ft along well-defined corridors for commercial delivery services and leave the rest for amateurs.
The stuff I want from Amazon isn't going to be in stock within a 500 mile radius anyhow. I don't need tacos delivered by air.