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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.
3. Flight computer no longer receiving location data.
4. Drone does not take off.
Even if this is not the current config, it will be once the makers realise this is what people are doing.
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These would be the sort of people I would be happy to see return their drone for a full refund. They are the cancer of the RC community. We have been buzzing plywood around for decades with nowhere near this much trouble, their exclusion from the hobby will be of zero consequence, and a relief to responsible flyers who are being thrown under the bus with the idiots.
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English: PILE OF POO
English works it seems. So there seems to be at least support for the ASCII subset.
Where do I sign?
As an old RC pilot, I get fed up with this kind of people, too. Back when I was young (and the snow was THIS high, even in Summer...), there was no geofencing or anything like that. Oddly, we still didn't fly our planes near airports. Or near hazards. Or near populated land. Or anywhere where simple COMMON SENSE told you that it would be at the very least idiotic, to not use a stronger word, to fly your plane (or helicopter, or whatever) there.
Because people knew what consideration was. People THOUGHT before acting. And people most of all knew that actions have consequences.
But somehow that was lost in the past years somehow. Everyone's entitled to do whatever he pleases and as soon as (not if. Not even when) he fucks up, he blames everyone and their dog, the manufacturer of the gadget that got him into trouble and of course legislation for not protecting him from being a total moron.
Fuck them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1. Locate GPS antenna. 2. Stab with pointy object.
Does mean you'll have to pilot it though, not rely on automatic following of a flight path.
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. Wind blows, the weight is not evenly distributed, the four motors are not all equal, and neither are the props.
A good way to work around the restriction would be to intercept the updates. Even if they're encrypted (likely) then simply disabling network access should prevent the "temporary" restrictions such as at sporting events. 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.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
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
Yeah, because that worked so well for DVDs and region coding.
I'd like to add that due to public perception and possible regulation things are getting bad.
Ideally there would be more fields where drones are allowed to fly as interest has increased. I was told that one park no longer allows rc planes. Of course this same park also host paragliders and hang gliders, so I'm not sure what the real reason is.
Its really a shame that communities aren't springing up to encourage safe use in safe areas. At least they aren't where I live.
That technology has been available for a few decades.
Yes it has. But there has been a fundamental shift in the accessability of the technology. A majority of this technology has historically been radio transmitters that cost hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars, recievers that cost similar, and models that actually require a solid understanding of aerodynamics to build, trim and fly. Dozens if not hundreds of hours of work to build it. An big investment of time, money, and a dash of pride meant that flyers protected their craft like a their first born. Flying near an airfield would be unspeakable; No way in hell do I want my toy wrecked by errant prop or jet wash! (..I guess it would suck if I brought an actual plane down as well.. I guess).
The only thing different about drones is that they are slow and hence easier seen.
I disagree. Any spanner with a credit card and a desire to see their neighbours tits can go buy a ready to fly FPV drone cheap on eBay, hook it up to their smartphone, and get in the air in a second. No expensive equipment investment, no time invested in the build, no incentive to protect their flyer. THIS is the difference, and it has seen people who would never consider an RC aircraft suddenly snapping them up like the "toys" they are often marketed to be. So now you have a bunch of people who have no knowledge about aerodynamics or aviation generally who suddenly think "wouldn't it be sick to go fly this around an airport for lulz and photos", and suddenly we have the problems we are now seeing. Most fixed and rotary wing hobbyists I know have an inherent respect for their fellow flyers, be they scale or full size pilots. We all share the sky, and we'd rather not kill each other. HISTORICALLY there has been close to zero risk (no such thing as zero risk, where there are humans involved, there is always room for something to fuck up) but now the technology is more accessable to the "pleb public", the risks of serious incident is and will continue to increase. As you have said, there have been next to no incidents historically, but as many have pointed out to you, the fact this story even exists to publish is a demonstration that the danger is indeed increasing. To ignore these factors is about as ignorant as using an absolute term like "zero actual risk" when there is no way for you to know what is and has happened globally in the past.. however many years of RC flying as a hobby.
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Interestingly WiFi limits 5GHz channels due to use by weather radar commonly used in airport. If you're using WiFi near an airport, you turned off the country restrictions and your router doesn't do DFS correctly then you may be causing more aviation hazards than the drones. Careful which channels you use.
On the contrary. I wish them success, so that they can build and sell a beacon I can put in my backyard to fence off my home.
And yet, they just became my manufacturers of choice, because they are actively trying to do something about airspace incursions and in doing so, are opening peoples eyes to the potential dangers ("we are imposing these restrictions because x y z") of flying in close proximity to things they shouldn't.
I'd never give my money to a company that is arming idiots with tools that can interfere with airport operations, drop electrical grids and god knows what else. People will always whinge about being told they can't do something after the event, however if that something is clearly noted at point of sale as a limitation, they have the option of not buying it, or buying it and operating safely. More power to them.
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And eventually they're going to be flooded out of the market by Chinese manufacturers. There's already plenty of Chinese drones that are cheaper and work just as good as these expensive western made ones.
5. (subject to number 4 being worked around) Drone can't find its way home in an emergency.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Exactly, and this is where legislation comes in.
Bendix cannot sell aviation radio systems unless they are tested and ticketed by the aviation authority of the country in question. So we legislate the same way for drones. A manufacturer must have X Y Z features (with a good mind to making any measures as unhackable as possible, or more realistically, unhackable to 90% of the population) or it is not allowed to be imported or sold in the countries market, period. Buyers do not assume the risk of being caught with unregistered kit, the legislation can be broadcast in such a way that it educates flyers about airspace and separation safety, and if operators are indeed found to be in breach by hacking around measures designed to keep the hobby safe, then 10 tonnes of solid, legislated rape can be dropped on their heads. This also has the effect of encouraging manufacturers to build the systems in and build them well, lest they find they suddenly loose access to a market.
Yes, there will be grey/back imports but again, this is about setting up a workable framework that will be effective 95% of the time.
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If the state keeps taking responsibility from the people we will end up with no one knowing anymore what responsability is. "It is not forbidden so it's OK".
It was a long uphill battle for us over here too. Mostly due to hunters fearing that our noisy engines would scare their prey away. At least until we could show footage of a (wild) rabbit sitting and eating only a few feet from a staring RC plane and not giving a shit about the ruckus. They got used to it, noticed that it ain't no threat at all and simply didn't give a shit.
We had to deal with paragliders and we found terms to agree on, we are in contact with the paragliding club that's a few miles away and both sides agreed that we'd inform each other about our activities and what we do when, and so far in the past 2 decades here has not been a single incident or anything coming close to it. It's simply self regulating.
If, and only if, people remember something like common sense and common decency as well as being considerate. This of course falls flat on the face when a feeling of entitlement comes into play. I may do this because $insert_reason. Of course this will be met with resistance. And in no time you have two sides that will go out of their way to make life miserable for the others just to put them down.
And that's when external regulations come in. Which doesn't help diddly squat because then that air of entitlement is enshrined in laws. We may do this because $law. Whether we actually want to do this or not is secondary, but YOU MUST NOT because $law says so. We can inconvenience you for no good reason whatsoever because we're entitled to being allowed to do this.
And that is the bullshit we're in.
And let's face it, the drone operators are not innocent in this either. Because "we may because there is no law against it" led to some drone owners doing inconsiderate things. Flying over settlements. Flying over private property and making people uneasy with the use of cameras. In some cases even endangering people because "there is no law against it so I can do it". Yes, there was no law against it because there was no reason for such a law until very recently. But that doesn't meant that you're allowed to simply shut your brain down, numbnut!
But of course people did, and now we get a ton of bullshit laws as the fallout of these blunders. And these laws now say not only that we can't do what common sense would pretty much say, i.e. don't fly in areas where there are a lot of people, don't fly in areas where there is air traffic, don't fly in areas where there is lot of stuff your drone could be harmed by or that your drone could harm, no, we get laws that pretty much outlaw drones altogether.
Why? Because it's easier to formulate the laws that way. We wouldn't need those laws if people didn't have that air of entitlement and "if there is no explicit law against it, I can do what I want and be a dick".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
TFS mentions two companies. One of them is Chinese (DJI).
I doubt the other Chinese companies can beat them so easily.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
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.'"
Yes, that's certainly a consideration as well. All you say is absolutely correct and the conclusions you draw are sound.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The quadcopter seems to be fundamentally different from the fixed-wing airplane. Either one costs roughly the same, about $200 for a cheap good one RTF. I recently built SK450 for $120 that you'd normally get a basically identical unit RTF for $200, and drone'd up a normally-$200 foam plane (1st gen e-Flite apprentice, sans SAFE... got acrotrainer now) that I got as part of a $10 lot of crap for much less, around half that. But although a fixed-wing drone is theoretically cheaper than a quad (my quad has 4x30A ESC and 980kV motor, my plane has 1x30A ESC and 890kV motor, IIRC — and the quad is made out of high-impact plastic, but the plane is basically made entirely out of stuff inferior to the packing material on a high-end laser printer) we really don't seem to see a bunch of people rushing out to fly their foamy trainers onto airports. What is it about quads that seems to lead to abuse? Is it just the hope of actually landing it and getting it back again after acting out?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So when will they produce the ability to "fence" your own property? Range restrictions?
You know I would kinda hate to be the second (or is it the third) person to shoot one of the drones down.
If you fly too close to the White House, your drone will self-destruct after sending the coordinates of the remote to secret service.
Just spent over a thousand dollars on a device that doesn't work everywhere. This is no different than the authorities saying that we, as search & rescue personnel, can't drive quads or jeeps or land a helicopter in a designated wilderness area. Oh, excuse me, Mr. On-Scene-TV-Reporter, have I got a story for you.
Yes, the fences will be hacked apart. Yes, you can bypass everything. And yes, you can fly in a red zone. At least, on a Phantom, just fly without the GPS. You shouldn't go far but puttering around your back yard will be fine.
What these restrictions WILL do is keep the MAJORITY of brain dead idiots (the 15 year olds that get a Phantom for Christmas) from mindlessly flying their new toy anywhere their multitasking-limited brains think is a good spur-of-the-moment idea. If you have enough brains to bypass the fences, either you are a terrorist or somebody you can trust to think past the next 30 seconds.
Think of it as a test.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
And eventually they're going to be flooded out of the market by Chinese manufacturers. There's already plenty of Chinese drones that are cheaper and work just as good as these expensive western made ones.
DJI is a Chinese company, you insensitive clod.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's also why I see this as a good thing. It raises the bar of getting to the point of doing something dangerous, but doesn't make anything new illegal or stop the really motivated tinkerers.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Thanks for the info. Note that I am _not_ talking about the high-end models, the contrary, I am talking about the cost-cutting Chinese manufacturers, such as Eachines. I don't fly the drones, only the piloted quads.
Enjoy your drones, especially the quad! I'm now looking at the page about it that you wrote on your blog.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Enjoy your drones, especially the quad! I'm now looking at the page about it that you wrote on your blog.
I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't live right next to an airport! I still don't even know where I can reasonably fly. I've only done very low-altitude flights with the quad, and nothing with the fixed-wing yet. Neither model is set up for FPV yet, so there's no temptation to abuse the airspace anyway.
I wonder how hard it would be to hack the sonar sensor from an "electronic tape measure" to work in my plane. The business end of the circuit appears moderately well-isolated.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My Inspire has had this for several months now. Why is this just now making it as "news"?
A couple of years ago I was given a packet of 'Chinese Lanterns.' Basically incendiary devices: Paper balloons heated by a candle so they float.
The instructions warned not to launch them near woodlands, fields or urban areas. Or near the coast, near airports, near overhead power lines, near military facilities. I'm not sure where you actually could launch them. Not that anyone follows the instructions.
Back when I was young (and the snow was THIS high, even in Summer...), there was no geofencing or anything like that. Oddly, we still didn't fly our planes near airports. Or near hazards. Or near populated land. Or anywhere where simple COMMON SENSE told you that it would be at the very least idiotic, to not use a stronger word, to fly your plane (or helicopter, or whatever) there.
Oh please. Back when I was young I could carry guns on the plane under the condition they weren't loaded, buy cyanide from pharmacy, and didn't get put on a watch list ever time I bought a bag of fertilizer for the garden.
You must be under the impression that the bad apples are what is causing all your problems rather than a psycho oppressive government dead set on justifying it's own existence by crapping out a certain number of new restrictions per quarter. A few idiot drones are a rounding error for all the problems facing the world but the government needs to look busy on something. Someone would have eventually figured out that your RC plywood can be landed on the white house lawn and we'd be in the same position as we are now, faced with restrictions.
The only real question is why are drones allowed to be sold without a warning that they contain hazardous materials known to cause cancer?
I'd enjoy them a lot more if I didn't live right next to an airport! I still don't even know where I can reasonably fly.
That's the problem that every city dweller with a telescope has! For the telescope (actually 20x80 binoculars in my case) I try to get out of the city once every few weeks, and occasionally I'll take one of the kids. But don't take kids the first few times that you fly the quad. Those props are really dangerous, go google quadcopter injuries. You might even consider bringing a 1 meter by 1 meter cardboard shield along just in case.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I think you thought before acting because your hobby was expensive and you felt responsible for the RCs you built. Now that they cost nothing and there is no threshold to anything, the idiots are involved. I don't think this has anything to do with "Back when we were young".
They should make that restricted area huge! Cover the whole earth except for a little circle around senator feinstein's house. Make them all fly there!
RC planes cost next to nothing today with them being entirely built in China now. You can get a plane, ready to fly, for a fraction of what they costed 20 years ago. Even ignoring inflation. Still, old RC enthusiasts don't suddenly decide it doesn't matter if they fly them just anywhere. I can't think of a single case where someone who is "serious" about this hobby decided it would be a bright idea to start his latest dirt-cheap Chinaplane down main street. And these are people who can actually control the plane in a way that will most likely not result in an accident.
It's always the people who never had anything in mind with RC flying models and just now jumped on as they got cheap and you can stick cams on them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.