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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.
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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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.
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
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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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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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.
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.'"