If technology companies have their way, the buzz of a drone will soon be as ubiquitous as the glint of a smartphone screen. Facebook aims to deliver internet access from drones high in the stratosphere, Google wants to dro piping hot food at your door via quadcopter, and Amazon has just patented a shoulder-mounted drone to help police officers.
Today’s commercial drones carry lightweight radios and cameras, and pack powerful lithium ion batteries whose flight times last minutes rather than seconds.
But that is nothing compared to what could be coming soon. The change that Silicon Valley is working towards, and that many people fear, is drones harnessing the growing power of automation and artificial intelligence. When drones no longer need humans to control them, their usefulness will improve exponentially.
Deliveries of small packages, medicines and takeaway food, all of which have already happened, are only the tip of the iceberg. Why put up scaffolding to paint your house when an intelligent drone could do it in a flash? Drones could swarm into agriculture, industry and sports. They could hunt for missing hikers, respond to burglar alarms, and act as mobile speed cameras. Uber thinks that autonomous drones will one day even transport people around cities.
What’s holding drones back?
Such is the hype. But for every tech company with its head in the clouds, there are problems to bring them back down to earth. “There are big technical challenges,” says Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington. “There’s a bunch of PhD theses that need to be completed before you can build a drone to autonomously police an area, find intruders, and use facial recognition to know who is meant to be there. Plus, havin these things stay aloft beyond a few minutes is non-trivial.”
The problems get larger still when you think of a drone havin to avoid obstacles: weather, birds, manned aircraft and all the other drones zipping around. Nasa is developing an automatic low altitude air traffic control system called UTM but is not due to complete its research until 2019. Any real-world deployment of such a network is still many years off.
In the meantime, there is growing tension between drone enthusiasts who want flying robots filling our skies, and some regulators, pilots, politicians and the public who are less than excited at the prospect. New rules this summer from America’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), called Part 107, made it easier for commercial drone users to get airborne but stopped short of giving comprehensive guidance.
“Privacy is the biggest unanswered question,” says Arthur Holland Michel, director of the Centre for the Study of the Drone at Bard College, in New York. “The FAA has no hard rules relating to privacy or data collection and use, nor does it have any rules regarding overflights of private property.” While the federal government dithers, some American states and cities have passed their own laws, creating a patchwork of legislation that could frustrate future commercial services.
There is also uncertainty about when or even whether hi-tech operations, including flights without human operators, will be allowed. “At the end of the day, I just don’t know whether or not the FAA has the internal expertise to sign off on some of the more interesting uses,” says Calo.
Which country is leading on drones?
Little surprise, then, that some of the world’s biggest tech companies are testing their drones elsewher. Last month, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told a conference in Seattle: “We’re getting really good cooperation from the British equivalent of the FAA, the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority]. It’s incredible. It’s really cool.” Amazon is developing and testing its Prime Air delivery drones in the fields around Cambridge.
Despite the UK’s enthusiasm for Amazon, and similarly permissive test flights elsewher in Europe, Canada and Australia, “no single country stands out as being aeons ahead of everyone else,” says Holland Michel. “Though they may vary on the details, all countries are grappling with the same concerns. The deciding factor will be how flexible and responsive their regulations are.”
Public opinion will also play a role, especially in the use of controversial devices like police drones. Drones are already used by fire services and police forces to carry out aerial surveillance, but Amazon imagines a small personal drone acting as an all-seeing body-cam for the police.
Even armed drones are possible. “We are very likely to see drones equipped with less-than-lethal weapons, like sound cannons or tear gas canisters,” says Holland Michel. “The idea of weaponised drones will make a lot of people uncomfortable but if one of these drones saves lives, say by resolving an active shooter situation, that could change minds at both the regulatory and the popular level.”
