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Transportation Communications Wireless Networking Technology

An Air Traffic Control System For Drones 77

Posted by Soulskill from the hope-your-house-isn't-underneath-an-approved-drone-route dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Personal drones are become more popular, and many companies are trying to figure out ways to incorporate them into their business. So what do we do in 10 years, when the skies are full of small, autonomous vehicles? NASA and a startup called Airware are working on a solution: air traffic control for drones. "The first prototype to be developed under NASA's project will be an Internet-based system. Drone operators will file flight plans for approval. The system will use what it knows about other drone flights, weather forecasts, and physical obstacles such as radio masts to give the go-ahead. Later phases of the project will build more sophisticated systems that can actively manage drone traffic by sending out commands to drones in flight. That could mean directing them to spread out when craft from multiple operators are flying in the same area, or taking action when something goes wrong, such as a drone losing contact with its operator, says Jonathan Downey, CEO of Airware. If a drone strayed out of its approved area, for example, the system might automatically send a command that made it return to its assigned area, or land immediately."
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An Air Traffic Control System For Drones More

An Air Traffic Control System For Drones

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  • Drone or RPV?

  • This is a top to bottom, centralized way of handling the problem.
    Obviously a decentralized way of organizing the flight would work a lot better, but it would require coding some protocols on the drones and governments want to keep control.

    This is a stupid solution, having to file a flight path befor the flight and waiting for the government official to give you the green light.

    • There's nothing about time constants there. A drone could easily ask for a spatiotemporal region and acquire its exclusive use just before venturing into it.

    • clearly you've never seen a mass migration of 100,000 starlings, all constantly crashing into each other. What they need is a President bird to coordinate their actions.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      When your drone files for a flight plan, does it have to provide insurance information as well? If a $500 drone falls from the sky, it could theoretically cause millions of dollars in damages.

    • having to file a flight path befor the flight and waiting for the government official to give you the green light.

      FTsummary- "The system will use what it knows about other drone flights, weather forecasts, and physical obstacles such as radio masts to give the go-ahead."

      Where did you get that a "government official" would be involved?

  • Skynet, Obviously (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Wouldn't this just be... skynet?

  • and it will take how long for someone to use this system to hijack one of these and do nefarius things with it? 20min?

  • 1) a protocol

    2) sufficiently wide approval of said protocol

    So how do we get that ? In our world, there are five ways to build systems: a) technoloy-driven ( done by the Gyro Gearlooses of our world ) 2) purpose-driven systems ( MS Office et al., ain't gonna work here ) 3) sociotechnical systems ( may work here ? ) 4) politicotechnical systems ( basically, things like the entire Internet, or national highway networks ) 5) open source systems ( seems to be the best candidate here ? )

  • Autonomous individuals sometimes do bad things or get into conflicts. The solution is a central, controlling authority that knows what's best for them. A central, controlling authority can always work things out better than autonomous individuals, because it has all information and always knows the best way to act on it.

    Wow, why hasn't anyone thought of this before?

    • Apparently I should've leaned less on snark in my original comment.

      By mandating central control, you're making so many assumptions -- the central controller is correct, the central controller scales successfully to the maximum traffic level, there is reliable communication at all times between the central controller and every autonomous agent, every autonomous agent correctly reports its position and status to the central controller, every autonomous agent responds correctly to direction from the central co

  • Piffle (Score:2)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    I build and fly these "drones" (multirotors) for fun and work, the type of hardware that would be required wouldn't fit in most hobby level "drones" that are seen causing all the problems (DJI Phantom's etc) and the infrastructure to provide what the above implies would be extensive.
    For commercial UAV's of size sure no problem, larger, more powerful radio systems and greater payloads.

    At best, with the current people in charge, I can see what I do becoming illegal, or too expensive to participate in.
    It's a s

    • I think they're talking about the self piloted Amazon delivery type of drones rather than the RC hobbyist craft.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by koan ( 80826 )

        I build them bigger than that, you need at least an 800 to get a DSLR into the or a smaller quad with 8 motors.
        But I know what you're saying, for "commercial" use meaning several of the jobs I do will most likely be regulated so that I can't compete due to cost.

  • They're not autonomous. Who talks to ATC? (Score:3)

    by DutchUncle ( 826473 ) on Friday October 17, 2014 @09:22AM (#48168041)
    My apologies if it seems I'm duplicating the post "Name" saying "Drone or RPV?". These things are not autonomous drones; they are actively controlled by people. There is no ATC of the things in the air; it's all about the various people wherever they happen to be on the ground.

    There's a park near us where people fly RC planes. Fun to watch, and people keep them over the park, and there's no question they're controlled. The first time someone put up a multi-rotor, though, someone asked, "Is that a drone? Can it go by itself?" No. It's an RC plane just like everything else. And if you keep it over the open land in the park, and stay away from people's windows, you'll be fine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by JStyle ( 833234 )

      As someone in the hobby, technically, any unmanned aerial vehicle is a drone. Yes, for some, that word means "weaponized", but it's obvious that your park flyers aren't weaponized. It's a good opportunity to inform the public about the hobby, safety, and different characteristics of drones (even RC drones).

      Additionally, flying a multi-rotor without some level of autonomy can be quite dangerous. Most models have sophisticated controllers that will maintain altitude and position with no input from the pilot.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      There's a park near us where people fly RC planes. Fun to watch, and people keep them over the park, and there's no question they're controlled. The first time someone put up a multi-rotor, though, someone asked, "Is that a drone? Can it go by itself?" No. It's an RC plane just like everything else. And if you keep it over the open land in the park, and stay away from people's windows, you'll be fine.

      A lot of multitrotors, while not completely autonomous, are partially autonomous in that they can handle a l

    • Which "these things" are not autonomous? Do you think amazon's vision for drone delivery is to have a guy joysticking each drone? Even hobby drones are leaving behind RPV [gizmag.com].

    • The parent's post is wrong on so many levels. Let's start with the technical:

      1. Most multi-rotor toys which are bought from anywhere more dedicated to the hobby than toys-r-us ARE drones. Can it go by itself? A lot of people will answer no, and yet when their controllers drop out the drone (and I will keep using that word) will return to launch, or hold position. Most entry level drones are controlled via GPS and barometrics. That is how the hobby has suddenly taken off to thousands upon thousands of unskil

  • shotguns (Score:2, Funny)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 )
    What is the best load for a drone? I'm thinking #4 buck shot.

  • This sounds like a centralized style solution. It only works if communication between any drone and the central server/agency is maintained. For some parts, like flight planning, this is fine. But for collision avoidance I don't think this will cut it.

    In the shipping world we already have a decentralized system called Automatic Identification System (AIS) [wikipedia.org]. Every vessel broadcasts its position and course on a common radio channel. Other vessels listen and if equipped with collision avoidance systems can tak

    • Would this call for custom RF hardware, which could be expensive, plus licensing a band for it? A cell modem module seems cheaper to me. But aside from some kind of data broadcast, which seems inefficient, that would still require some way of finding the closest drones to tell them that you're approaching, ergo someone who knows where everyone is.

      I don't know, but to me, the conceptualization of the problem using a central authority seems very simple. Represent all drone routes or operation areas as 4D poly

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It seems to me the real problem is separating drone traffic--including drones bought by amateurs and self-built drones--from passenger carrying aircraft. Meaning rather than sending commands causing drone traffic "swarms" to self-separate or to prevent them from flying outside of their desired area--which strikes me as problematic if you want ot use a drone to inspect a pipeline or inspect telephone wires (for example)--wouldn't it be better to simply create advisories to help separate drones from passenger

  • This is just more government and not something we need. People who think the skies would be packed with drones have no concept of 3D space. Drones are tiny. Skies are huge. Value of drones is low. Air Traffic Control for drones is totally unnecessary. This is just a distraction from the much more important issue of privacy.

  • implement flock vs flock avoidment behaviour.
  • This will likely cost a lot to use: a competitive market for 'transactions' and licensing. Imagine each segment or corridor of airway being owned and sublet by someone who sets transit pricing. Imagine the licensing process itself being regulated like domain names. It's likely to be better if regulated exclusively by a central authority, on a not-for-profit basis.
  • I like the unwritten but implied bit about all drones having code which allows them to be controlled by this central system, at a minimum to be forced to land.

    Regulations will come out stating that all drones have to have Airware software running on them allowing the central control system to be able to land them or modify their flight plans in case of a need. Any drone found flying without it will be free game to bring down via other methods and/or subject to a fine and loss of the drone to the governm
  • A perfect use for Cloud Computing.

  • I think they are way off the mark as to the nature of the problem they are trying to solve as well as the timing of it. I believe there is a good possibility that we will have not thousands or tens of thousands, but millions of smaller drones in the air by 2020. And, yes, they will be autonomous or semi-autonomous. Putting Google cars on the road is harder than making drones autonomous.

    The key to understanding here is that these are just robots. As we move further into the age of personal robotics, there wi

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