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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the taking-control-from-the-user dept.

"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.

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NASA and Air Traffic Control for Drones 2 comments

Spotted at IEEE Spectrum there is a short piece on the development of air traffic control systems for drones at NASA.

Airspace above 500 feet is already well regulated by the FAA, but there's a potentially dangerous void that's about to get really crowded between 500 feet and either your skull or the ground, whichever comes first. At NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, NASA engineers and researchers are working on a way to manage that void, and the system they're trying to put in place would help out small autonomous aircraft in a number of ways

The article builds on a section from a New York Times article, and whilst it's (rightly) skeptical of the Amazon urban-delivery programmes there's some quotes from Nasa's Dr. Kopardekar of the NextGen Airspace Project on practical usages in the original.

“One at a time you can make them work and keep them safe,” said Parimal H. Kopardekar, a NASA principal investigator who is developing and managing that program. “But when you have a number of them in operation in the same airspace, there is no infrastructure to support it.”

Dr. Kopardekar said he expected the first commercial applications to be in agriculture and “asset monitoring,” like keeping an eye on crops or remote oil pipelines.

“In agriculture, I’m hoping we will see some action inside of the next year,” he said.

Google Wants Order in Uncontrolled Airspace So its Wing Drones Can Fly 12 comments

To bring order to low-altitude airspace so its Project Wing delivery drones can get off the ground, Google is proposing a set of rules for operating aircraft below 500 feet. The proposal calls for all drones, including those flown by hobbyists, to constantly transmit identification and position information so airspace access and collision avoidance can be managed by computer.

The proposal, unveiled on Wednesday by Dave Vos, head of the Wing project, seeks to take moment-to-moment control of airspace under 500 feet away from air traffic control authorities and put it in the hands of private airspace service providers, he said. These companies, which he called ASPs, would receive data from all craft in flight, including hobbyist drones, emergency helicopters and commercial craft like those being developed by Google Wing. Before every flight, each craft would send a short flight plan. The flight might be approved as requested, approved with modifications to take into account other users, or denied.

[...] Right now, use of this low-altitude airspace is largely unregulated and hobbyists are able to fly without having to identify themselves, their vehicles or detailed flight plans. That’s one reason the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) only allows drone flight within visual line of sight. But if Google, Amazon and other companies are to use drones for package delivery and other services, the line-of-sight restriction will need to be lifted.

[...] Vos is proposing the system be based as much as possible around technology that already exists, to reduce development and standardization time. That means drones and aircraft would use ADS-B, an aviation industry standard used on many airliners that sends out position, heading, speed and identification data every few seconds. All large planes already have ADS-B transponders, but with entry-level equipment starting at around $2,000, many smaller aircraft do not. Earlier this year, Google said it had started development of an “ultra low-cost” ADS-B transponder that will be cheap enough that every operator will be able to afford it. “If you can’t afford it, you can’t afford to fly, in my opinion,” he said. “That means we need to make sure everyone can afford it.”


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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:58PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 11 2015, @02:58PM (#221280)

    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.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:14PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:14PM (#221286)

    Another aspect to think about in urban areas is a human chopper is probably cheaper than drones... so a wet Raven which can carry 800 pounds of crew and cargo costs $400/hr including a healthy profit margin for my local FBO, so a regular delivery "route" in Manhattan could probably leverage and bulk down to an overall systemic total cost of maybe $400/hr for 600 pounds of delivery in less than an hour. Now $400 sounds expensive but advanced routing solving the traveling salesman problem in real time etc etc means you could probably deliver anything in Manhattan for $100 per UPS size/weight limited box in a half hour or so. I'm assuming enough delivery volume for each plane to take off with at least four packages less than 100 pounds each. There will be more deliveries some hours (massive profit) and less deliveries some hours, of course, but I figure 4 isn't outta whack on average.

    When you look up rental rates "wet" means you show up and fly, no maintenance, no fuel, no oil, they take care of it all. "dry" means you pay your own fuel, oil, whatever. Some cheap places quote you rates without insurance while refusing to rent unless you prove insurance so basically add $5/hr or whatever. All kinds of ripoffs in rental land. Yet if it Fs, Fs, or Fs, you're better off renting than owning, for most values of F.

    I'm thinking of a stereotypical R-44 with IFR nav suite and all that. Plus the skyscrapers already have helipads.

    Just saying that there's plenty of airspace for non-drones and in busy areas its probably cheaper to just rent a normal chopper.

    Fixed wing CFII/ATP rated instructor hours have been like $25/hr since the 80s, unfortunately. A bit of an oversupply in the local market. I don't know how much commercial rated heli drivers get but it can't be toooo much more. Everything in urban areas costs more, but its not gonna be 10x as much, I suspect a heli pilot can't cost much more than $75/hr under any conditions in any location?

  • (Score: 1) by NezSez on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:32PM

    by NezSez (961) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:32PM (#221292) Journal

    Great, now we can have traffic jams in 6 degrees of freedom.
    India, Brazil, and many others will obviously *NOT* adopt these algorithms:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA [youtube.com]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:13PM (#221301)

    Maybe I'll get to see some flying cars, before I die.

    A flying car can already be seen for example when a car goes over a cliff. If you see it before you die, you probably are exactly at the impact point.

  • (Score: 2) by gidds on Wednesday August 12 2015, @01:12PM

    by gidds (589) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @01:12PM (#221669)

    (This is probably a heretical view, but I like playing Devil's Advocate :-)

    The air is already fairly crowded: there are light aircraft, gliders, remote-controlled aircraft, kites, balloons, birds, bats, insects, the odd plastic bag...

    And there's already a navigation system that works for them all: it's called Visual Flight Rules [wikipedia.org], and it's simple enough that both flies and flying-boats can do it.

    Any new devices that take to the air will need to cope with all those things.  And while some aircraft might be regulatorially (if I can coin such a word) forced to implement new systems, you won't persuade birds, bees, or butterflies to do the same.

    So isn't it simpler and safer all round to expect new devices to follow the existing rules???

    After all, that's what we're doing with autonomous vehicles on land: Google cars etc. have had huge development efforts to interact with human drivers and other obstacles by following the existing rules of the road.  Why should the air be any different?

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