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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.
Must. Not.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Our "awareness" is very like composed of a hierarchy of smaller "awareness" components... put enough of them together and you'll have something that's either as aware as you or a perfect representation of your awareness.
Make it a felony to operate a drone in no fly zones, problem solved.
and on
Considering that easy-to-fly drones require a non-trivial amount of processing anyway it's probably not unreasonable to require drone of a certain class/size/wattage/capability/whatever to have a built in map of coords that say "don't fly here" - SoCs with GPS and a 1ghz arm core and and any number of useful DSPs (including all the shit you need to talk to inertial sensors you need anyway) are less than 5 bucks in bulk.
A bit of initiative and self regulation from the fledgling drone industry will go a long way to assuage the notoriously brutal and heavy handed FAA. (They're mean for a reason. Flight safety is serious shit.) I'm surprised the FAA hasn't brought the hammer down already. They've been pretty damn lenient with drones already compared to just about every other bit of flight related regulation they've had in the past.
Of course, they may just be slow to act.
So the thing is this seems to rely on people giving a crap, and going to great pains to implement these features.
It assumes voluntary compliance ... at which point you can pretty much conclude it's meaningless crap.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Whenever I read an article about "drones" they are invariable talking about radio controlled quad copters. They're not autonomous, they're controlled by individuals. People have been flying radio controlled planes as a hobby for 60+ years. We don't have a drone problem, we have a moron problem.
I think this could be reasonably handled with geofences.
Easiest ways to do this would be to give each drone its own satellite radio receiver and get the nofly maps continuously through something like xm's datacasting service.
Next best option would be to give every drone its own gsm radio to pull nofly maps every 10 minutes or so.
You shouldn't be allowed to enter or take off in a no fly zone however you should still be able to leave the area under your own control if a nofly zone is declared while you are in flight.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
What about making the humans who are piloting them self-aware?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
How about you just make mere negligence sufficient to convict someone of illegal drone use. FFS, you're flying your drone into a wildfire area. If you aren't part of the fire team responding to it or authorized by them to help then Get. The. Fuck. Out. And if you don't, and anyone dies because you just had to nerd it up with your drone in the middle of a minor natural disaster then your ass should get charged with felony murder as well.
Self-awareness will NOT keep drones out of no fly zones. Because drones cannot possible know what is a no fly zone due to firefighter efforts, manhunt, ATC, sporting events, political events, and other things which happen regularly but which the drone cannot possibly obtain information about. The only way to keep drones out of a no fly zone is if a human decides not to fly due to seeing that something is going on which they should not be flying in, or another human "assists" the first human in keeping that drone out of the airspace.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Interesting that people, even enthusiasts, might tolerate aircraft that won't fly in areas someone else designates and radio receivers that won't receive frequencies that someone else decides are off-limits but not guns that won't shoot inside of banks and courthouses (aside from the impracticality of that).
Which amendment was it that covered the right to fly drones wherever you feel like it again?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'll give a self aware drone about 5 minutes before someone hacks their bios to load Cyanogen Drone OS because fuck you don't tell me what to do with my property even if it's violating someone else's property.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
personal quadcopters in a firefighting area. If they can forcibly stop a car from entering an active crime scene or fire area, they can do this.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Self-awareness is the last thing we need from a drone. How hard is it to write an algorithm that simply checks current location and current trajectory, against inter-sections of no-fly zones? Sure you need a map database, but even self-aware systems need to check against some data source. Not even self-aware humans can't guess right as to whether they are in a place that should be a no fly zone and why flying in certain locations are bad, based on recent news reports.
I am guessing Chris is making the problem to be more complicated than it is, in order to get funding for his project?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Photonic fences as used against mosquyito could be adapted for enforcing drone-less zones.
I hate to say this, but we probably need to do it the other way around, and geofence the drones in designated areas for aircraft to avoid, much like model aircraft, high-power model rockets, etc. It's the way the military operates drones. They are only permitted to operate within Restricted or Warning areas or along designated corridors that are marked on VFR charts and listed in the NOTAMS.
Self-awareness is a long way off. If computing resources is a problem for the drone, how about sticking a computing board in the transmitter/controller and having it do the GeoFencing? With the transmitter getting updates from local law enforcement (a la Waze) it wouldn't be too hard to put a geo fence around every incident. With a couple of shotguns, the police can easily enforce the no-fly zone...
Which amendment was it that covered the right to fly drones wherever you feel like it again?
Neither the constitution nor the bill of rights is meant to be or contain an exhaustive list of your rights. Rather, the default position is supposed to be that you have a right to do something unless it interferes with someone else's well-being. The bill of rights does not define "arms", which would obviously include even weapons designed not to fire within certain locations.
I agree that such a law would interfere with the right to keep and bear arms, but don't get all misty-eyed over what is after all just a piece of paper that our government feels free to ignore when it suits it, for as long as it suits it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
The article is about 3DR, who sells the Pixhawk (open source hardware flight controller). The hardware is open source. The software is open source (Missionplanner).
If the developers made airport no-fly zones un-fly-able, it would be trivial for the community to override. Also the developers would lose support. Currently Missionplanner does display airports, but it is for information purposes only (does not inhibit flying).
Also, this would only work if GPS was enabled. If it was disabled, or removed entirely, these no-fly zones wouldn't work. Many drones (cheaper) do not have GPS so this article doesn't apply to them.
I think this could be reasonably handled with geofences.
I'm very dubious that would work. It's a technical solution to a social problem and an impractical one at that. Technical solutions to social problems rarely work. In this case the appropriate answer would probably be some sort of drone pilot license to purchase and/or operate. Operation outside of private property without a license results in jail time and/or fines just like with an automobile or ham radio.
Well, since the Constitution specifically mentions the fact that it does not enumerate you rights it's a moot point.
I am in no way claiming that flying a drone is a right, just wish people would stop asking where in the Constitution a right is.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
First, this isn't new. Software-based no-fly zones already exist in drones, such as over the DC area. See this story from the Washington Post about this already being done. The difference is that such zones are static, not dynamic.
A NOTAM is a notice to airmen of potential hazards to aircraft. If police or firefighters need exclusive access to a portion of airspace, they need to issue a NOTAM indicating that all other aircraft should avoid that area. This is already done for military training operations, for example. Other events that might present hazards such as fireworks, hot-air balloons, and air shows issue NOTAMs so pilots know to avoid those areas. In reality, what needs to happen is that drones obey NOTAMs and any such restrictions included within, whether temporary or permanent. And the issue involving DC wouldn't have been a problem had the drones simply obeyed NOTAM 0/8326.
It's not clear to me how that information will be transmitted to drones in real-time, though. Other aircraft generally aren't programmed to specifically avoid areas under NOTAM no-fly restrictions, mostly because pilots are expected to be trained to obey them. So either there has to be a way for drones to automatically download and obey NOTAMs or their operators need to be able to receive NOTAMs and manually comply with them. The latter solution is difficult right now because anyone can operate a drone for recreational purposes under 400 feet in areas without flight restrictions. There are basically two options, and they're not mutually exclusive: 1) require some kind of certification to legally operate a drone that shows they understand the rules and can do so safely or 2) program drones to automatically comply with NOTAMs.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
How about a two-part solution?
First, design a "Go Away!" transmitter. These could be deployed in security areas, wildfire areas, and where ever they are needed. Might use normal WiFi bands with a digital code.
Second, require that all drones be equipped with a receiver for these "Go Away!" transmitters. Reception of such a signal would cause the drone to reverse course and fly away until the signal was no longer received.
A drone crashed into the seats at the U.S. Open and at a University of Kentucky football game.
So far, no one has had bodily harm from someone doing stupid things like this but, like everything else, it will happen and then the shit will hit the fan (or blood will hit the drone blades as the case may be).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The Nissan GTR does this in Japan. On normal roads it's speed-limited to 180km/h but if you enter a racetrack area it removes all restrictions automatically.
No sig today...
new, plastic propellered, human dependent, man toy, overlords.
(Every /. summary about AI or robots should have an automatic first post with this subject line. Then we could compete to fill in the funniest description. That would really make /. fun again. I know somebody has gotta be able to come up with something better than my lame attempt.)
Proof read...I should do it more often.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
OR, every drone would need to access the database wirelessly in real time to know where it can or can't go. So to be effective, in the case of a man hunt, the police would have to constantly update the database with locations and the drone would have to be continually querying the DB for prohibited locations.
And local government has the ability to push notifications to subscribed cell phones regarding local emergency alerts.
Also aircraft have transponders identifying their position, drones could listen for these transponders.
The potential solutions can be far simpler than you suggest.
3. If you ditch the Fire and Police nonsense ...
And this is the attitude that will get drones heavily restricted. Like drivers of autos you *must* yield to and stay out of the way of emergency services.
The best way to get drones to obey regulations is to put them in charge of the Obamacare death panels. Now that I have captured your interest, I will explain what I mean by "Obamacare death panels" as something completely mundane and poorly labelled.
How do you feel about over flights from:
Helicopters (Private, commercial, ambulance, police, military)
Light aircraft( hot air balloons, paragliders, hang gliders, ultralights)
Private aircraft.
Commercial/military jets.
Imaging satellites.
You don't think twice about any of these aircraft, and many are indeed photographing you and your property(Google and government imaging, property appraiser aerial photography...). But a $800 toy helicopter draws a knee jerk reaction? Get over yourself!
... Only shotguns can keep drones out of do not fly zones.
and many guns can take out some pretty craftier-than-a-drone game at reasonable distances. That would be a good place to start. And "Under The Dome" is a pretty great read, equally lousy TV. Don't know why Stephen cooperated on that one.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
In this post-911 world, I think we should ban all private aircraft. And box cutters. And, clearly, underwear. And pressure cookers. And trash cans. And backpacks. And wires. And lighters. And sanity.
...
Actually, we're making headway on that last one
FPV and drove aircraft operators love gadgets that help them with their flights such as GPS, antenna tracking functionality and on-screen displays. The FAA should provide free GPS-enabled beacons that would let the government track these aircraft in real-time. Hobbyists (myself included) would jump at free gear that would allow them to track lost aircraft (too late for my plane, I'm afraid!). FAA could throw in some special sauce like ability to remotely enable loiter mode, auto-land, perhaps fly predetermined routes (DIY Drones stuff has much of this capability already) I can live with having to obey the laws of the air at the expense of carrying some free gadgets on my aircraft.
For all our legislated control over dogs we still can't stop some people from breeding and training really nasty ones who occasionally escape and bite the face off the nearest child (it has happened), so why should we believe that we can control the use of drones by people who know they are doing the wrong thing with them? Furthermore mandating behavioural control rules for drones will kill the DIY autopilot market as it would only be legal to fly sealed and certified units.
But is that blacklisting the rest of the world (but in millions of pieces), or whitelisting a few racetracks? The drone problem is far more akin to the former.
If someone is on the bleeding edge of this industry, and respected by this industry, how the hell do we take the industry seriously? No one with a clue will claim "self-awareness" as a goal for industry. Does *anyone* in this industry have a clue that isn't superficial knowledge of flight and 3d printers?
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Some drones do this automatically. For example, the most popular one: http://www.dji.com/fly-safe/ca...
This is an excellent example of why "well how the hell was I supposed to know that was illegal" should be a perfectly valid defence.
Really? You think "I didn't know it was against the law to murder someone" should be a valid defense? If ignorance was a valid defense then anyone could claim ignorance of any crime to get away with it. You CANNOT have ignorance of the law be a valid defense and have a working legal system.
The point of law isn't to throw as many people in prisons as possible.
Who said it was? The point of licensing is to prevent problems before they occur. We require people get formal training to operate other types of vehicles primarily for safety reasons. The fact that the operator isn't sitting in the vehicle with a drone really is just a corner case of the same problem.
If a law will destroy people's lives for not realizing that playing with a perfectly ordinary, store-bought toy would be illegal, then that law should be null and void on that basis.
They can buy the toy. They just have to be trained and licensed on its use and legal operating parameters first. No different than operating a motor vehicle. When physical safety is a concern then you mandate training. No amount of automation will prevent people from doing stupid things that they shouldn't.
And as a - undoubtedly completely unintended - side effect, it'll effectively kill the technology before it can change status quo by killing the mass market.
Why should it kill the mass market? We sell plenty of motor vehicles and aircraft and they require licensing. Why should drones be any different?
What if we feed photo recognition software in drones?
Casteism
Ham radio operators are a good example.
Yet, any customer can buy cheap radio equipement (e.g.: Wifi dongle) that are designed to be used by untrained end-users and are designed to only operate within safe limits (and only limits on wavelenghts they are allowed to.
People with license can buy separate, more expensive hardware specifically designed to allow access to other frequencies. (Or at least a hacker need to reflash firmware, e.g.: to allow using EU-only Wifi frequencies inside the US).
But there's no such thing as a safety aware drone - unlike the cheap Wifi equipement.
It's not a complex expensive equipment that are only sold in small quantities to specifically licensed people.
They are mass produced (relatively) cheap, that anybody can afford, easily buy and easily operate.
(That would be as if every single radio device was a pure software-defined-radio, where you need to manually type de frequency by hand - any frequency accepted - and radom users would go on involontary rampage frying nearby sensitive equipment because they didn't knew that they shouldn't type some numbers).
TFA is about building such safeties inside drones. Having drone with the ability to evaluate which zones are "no fly" and refuse to go ther when instructed (which is a bit more complicated than locking a radio within certain frequency range).
Rather than comparing to the radio, you should compare to the street:
- driving cars requires some licensing (Driver license
- walking around, biking, roller skating doesn't (They either are mass produced cheap stuff that would be hard to control, or don't require any equipement)
(also notice how cars are getting IA built into them to automatically avoid collisions)
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Hence the whole idea of trying to put as much IA in drone as possible so they could themself identify no fly zones when their clueless user cannot, and refuse to go there if instructed (which is a complex problem and require massive advances IA).
That would be similar to how most Wifi dongle out-of-the-box will only operate on authorised frequencies (and would require some firmware reflashing to operate on other frequencies outside the authorised one, if the hardware is ever capable of so).
(Luckily for Wifi that's much easier to achieve - so we already have moe or less safe devices everywhere).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
If i were doing something criminal, i'd like to title my area a "no fly zone" so i wouldn't be seen by the authorities with their drones.