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Only Self-Awareness Can Keep Drones Out of Do Not Fly Zones
szczys writes: Chris Anderson is on the bleeding edge of the drone world, having founded 3D Robotics (drone manufacturer) and DIY Drones (enthusiast site). He takes on the issue of people flying drones where they shouldn't, and concludes that making drones self aware is the best solution. This isn't the "robots are trying to kill you" type of self awareness. Instead, it considers drone type, operator, and location, to establish if all those factors equate to a safe flight area. This is an important issue — in the last few months, there have been several stories about drones in places they should not have been. This included incidents like disrupting the efforts of airborne firefighting and interfering with a police manhunt.
What industry? My drone is fully autonomous and yet home made and open source. GPS fencing isn't as trivial as you think. There are literally millions of technical no fly zones and that doesn't even begin to consider transient zones like during fire fighting exercises.
GPS fencing is not only unenforceable but also technically infeasible.
Sure you can arrest and charge someone for breaking the rules but the vast majority of these cases are people not knowing any better.
Then when they get arrested they will be educated. Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense. This is an excellent example of why that has to be the case.
If these drones are interfering with full-sized aircraft, penalties don't prevent the danger presented by naive operators.
I think it would not be very hard to make it abundantly clear that manslaughter charges could be applied.
In other cases of public assets like the airwaves we have required licensing to utilize them. Ham radio operators are a good example. I see no reason why we shouldn't require a license to operate a drone in any public airspace in a similar manner. Require sellers of drones to demand proof of an operator's license before they can sell their product. Then nobody can argue that they did not know AND we have a means to ensure appropriate training and use.
GPS is 1575mhz, which is affected by line-of-sight. If you don't have a clear line-of-sight, your location will be off. Inside my house, my location sometimes bounces around by 2 miles on my multirotor.
Outside its affected by anything that refracts, diffracts or reflects radio waves. IE power lines, buildings, anything really. Power lines near my drone put it 10 feet to the opposite side.
Or if you really want to affect it, just cup your hands around it. Doesn't take much to interfere with it.
We don't have a drone problem, we have a fear mongering society problem. A society that demonizes things out of hysteria. A society that wants feel good knee-jerk reaction legislation (that IMO is often counter productive).