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Drone Makers Add Geofencing To Keep Drones Out of Restricted Airspace (roboticstrends.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Two of the biggest drone manufacturers, DJI and 3D Robotics, are adding geofencing systems to their products to keep them out of restricted airspace. DJI's Geospatial Environment Online will be available on current versions of the Phantom, Inspire and Matrice drones, providing updated data on restricted flight zones due to regulation or safety concerns, including forest fires, major stadium events, VIP travel and other circumstances. GEO will also include restrictions around areas such as prisons, power plants and more. GEO, by default, will not allow DJI drones to fly in restricted areas. However, DJI is allowing its users to "temporarily unlock or self-authorize" flights in some locations. 3D Robotics will add the safety information software to its Solo smart drone app, containing basic information about federal guidelines (stay five miles from an airport, for example), national parks, airbases and more.
Last I checked, "restricted airspace" for drones included some hilariously large areas - check out what appears to be the official map. Note that includes five miles from airports (why I can't legally fly drones at my own house) and anywhere in a national park.
Or you could just not be retarded. Just kidding, I know that's not an option.
If drones are geofenced to stay 5 miles from airports, all of the bay area is excluded. It is about 30 airports in the area.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I pilot (non-robotic) quadcopters, not drones, and let me tell you that without a fair bit of practice a "drone pilot" will do little more than crash his expensive plastic without the robotic positioning. I don't think that the current models even come with a proper transmitter for really controlling the flight, a good transmitter costs more than the flight hardware. The GPS is used for more than navigation, for instance I believe that some devices don't have accelerometers and use the GPS to hold altitude, position, and heading.
Well, no. The GPS is used for position and speed, if the manufacturer is competent then that's it. You can't get reliable altitude measurements from it, that's where GPS is weakest and most of these tiny antennas are lucky to pull in four sats. A barometer is used for altitude and at least 3DOF sensors are used for flight control. If you want auto-leveling flight, you need 6DOF. You are going to also need a barometer for altitude, though. You can throw in 3 more degrees with a magnetic sensor, which is enough to get absolute orientation. Where the GPS comes in is in position hold, return to home, or waypoint flying. That's the only place the typical drone uses it at all.
For basic self-leveling flight, the only sensors needed are on a 6DOF sensor board, e.g. MPU6050 or similar. That's one chip. For fully controlled flight with RTH and PH you need 7DOF (6DOF plus magnetic heading), Baro, and GPS. Most fancy-pants drones are going to use 9DOF plus baro and GPS. A 3DOF mag sensor is much better than a basic compass, because it can be used in other orientations than flat.
I'm not an expert, but I've built two drones recently (one quad, one fixed-wing) and forked Multiwii so as to add sd card logging support to it...
The "permanent" restrictions, such as those around Washington, DC (not Washington as mentioned in the poor article) and airports will probably require a way to either flash the storage medium via JTAG or decrypt the traffic. I figure the community will take less than a year before it figures out one or the other, based on how quickly other consumer devices are cracked.
I would be shocked and amazed if they were actually doing anything meaningful to keep users out of the device. Probably the biggest impediment to anyone bothering to hack these drones so far is that it's too easy and cheap to just build your own, or to buy a RTF kit that's made out of parts you could have bought yourself and which has no geofencing. Most of the really cheap drones (e.g. with atmega328-based FCs) don't have the room for geofencing code! And even the ones that do have room don't do it, although I can see it coming in the future. It might even be a fun feature to develop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"