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"If you're wondering, the initiative aims to establish a feasible system that can manage the flow of traffic for unmanned aerial vehicles, helicopters, planes and gliders that fly 500 feet and below."
According to Richard Kelley, the group's lead scientist, they (everyone involved in the project, that is) "need to devise a system to make vehicles autonomously aware of each other so they can avoid each other, as well as a system to create traffic 'patterns' or navigation protocols that would keep aircraft away from each other in the first place." Kelley will load his software on a drone in the coming months and will begin conducting test flights while connected to a NASA server and under the space agency's supervision. That means he's not only testing his software, but NASA's traffic system itself.
Automated Air Traffic Flow would be a prerequisite for autonomous flying cars. Maybe I'll get to see some flying cars, before I die.
We provided earlier coverage of this in NASA and Air Traffic Control for Drones; there is also a story we ran about a similar effort by google: Google Wants Order in Uncontrolled Airspace So its Wing Drones Can Fly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:58PM
Obvious hack opportunity to redirect three letter agency and secret police spy drones into colliding with each other or high value ground targets. Or for that matter, high value air targets.
Aside from that, this smells a lot like exotic RF spectrum sharing techniques that really are needed in downtown Manhattan or similar but 99.999999% of the planets landmass will never have a spectrum, or airspace, shortage. Obviously a 75 floor residential condo will have slightly denser airspace issues than the 'burbs.
Might just end up being a side effect of urban living, drones won't really work for delivery if 15000 of your closest friends live within 500 feet of you. Might just be how it is, like it or not. Worth considering the financials for companies. Drone delivery companies focused on emergency hipster jeans and PBR can delivery business models might have to get used to delivering emergency baby diapers in the burbs instead due to airspace issues. It might be more profitable anyway, you run out of diapers you'll pay anything so just like housing tuition or health care they'll know it thus charge everything, but urban hipsters are only going to pay "enough to show off to other hipsters" for their drone delivered PBR.