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The political and ideological discussion in the USA about gun control laws and the 2nd Amendment has been a hot topic for decades. Usually, the topic remains in a glowing, hot-ember state. The heat and light emanating from this hot-ember pulses and intensifies when fanned by the news of mass murder involving guns. As drones become more prevalent in society, I fear the hot-embers of this age-old debate will fan into flames. While one must have a license to operate either machine, that legal requirement will not deter those with harmful intent.
Putting aside the political and ideological debates, how would soylentils implement a no-fly zone for drones - especially ones with harmful payloads or in areas containing volatile substances?
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Ask Soylent: Drones and the Right to Bear Arms
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innovate, v.:
To annoy people.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:02PM
enforce a rule that all massproduced drones are controled via EM radiation in a certain range of frequencies.
An unauthenticated signal like that is going to be abused by people who think it is funny to push a button and watch all the aircraft scatter like cockroaches from a flashlight. The concept of a drone-b-gone signal is interesting though. What would happen for aircraft inside the zone that receive a signal that says they can't be here? Are they supposed to immediately navigate to a safe position outside of the exclusion zone? How are they going to form their route with out any kind of sensors for detecting obstacles in the environment?
When these things have autonomous operating modes they either navigate to exactly one point then land for an auto-return to home feature or they navigate by waypoint to waypoint. All of that is done open loop - no sensing is performed for obstacles, the craft will fly a straight path between where ever it is right now and where ever the next point is.
If the craft receives a new exclusion signal when none existed before should they immediately stop and hover until the pilot moves it to the safe zone? Should the craft automatically land? None of these cases are very good.
It seems rather impossible to create a device that wont allow a moron to hurt people with it but also is resilient to being abused and creating new safety hazards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:28PM
so what do they use now? Wi-fi? cell phone signals?
If I wanted a place to be drone free, for instance a playground, I would simply fill it with noise on the relevant frequencies. It doesn't matter if what they use is encrypted or not, since they can't separate it from the noise.
There are technicalities however... I don't know how much power I would have to pump in my machine in order to make a noisy enough environment (they can use directed signals, I can't).
As for "exclusion signals", that would be in software. Since software is so much easier to break than hardware, I would not rely on any company promising that their drones would listen to instructions. It also goes against the principle that once you buy something you can modify it however you please (since I assume there would be laws against changing the software). Which is wrong.
No, the only reasonable options are these: put a large, clear sign saying that drones are not allowed. If you can afford it, actually enforce that (have a sharpshooter ready, or buy a technical solution that will render the drones unusable). In both cases, if a violation is attempted, call the police and complain about tresspassing etc.
The guy who shot the drone spying on his daughters actually did just that --- he did not have a clear sign, but it was his backyard.
Getting back to the question in the summary: if you have volatile substances, then you should be able to afford a radar; when the radar detects something close enough, ask the guards to shoot it (I assume you have guards there anyway if you're dealing with volatile substances).
In the case of harmful payloads, be paranoid. Ask the drone engineers and the local bomb squad to come up with a protocol that would bring down the drone with the least danger that it would harm anyone.
In any case, I think the easiest technical solution for harmful payloads is to simply forbid the construction of drones that can carry too big a weight (no pizza delivering drones).
(Score: 4, Informative) by Knowledge Troll on Wednesday December 02 2015, @12:41PM
so what do they use now? Wi-fi? cell phone signals?
Hmm it depends on how much of a piece of shit it is. If it is a Parrot Bebop it uses WiFi and they are trivial to attack at the 802.11 level, take over the craft, and remotely operate it instead of the pilot. I've seen a hacked Parrot that flew around, auto-hacked other Parrots, and formed a fleet of compromised aircraft. I've never heard of anyone using cell phone signals.
It seems you think that the control signal for the aircraft can be disrupted to the point where a pilot can no longer control it. When you get to machines like the DJI Phantom or any hobby class craft the radio transmitters used both frequency hopping and direct sequencing spread spectrum. If we lived in 1995 you could quite easily destroy the EM spectrum in the frequencies used by r/c transmitters but it would have been illegal because jamming is illegal and it'd be dangerous because the jammed signal would be interpreted as valid control signal and the only predictable action would be eventually the machine will hit the ground in a totally uncontrolled manner.
Right now you would have to completely destroy the entire 2.4 GHz part 15 spectrum to knock the drones out of the air. If you could even achieve it (because both forms of spread spectrum operation are jam resistant) you would also successfully kill WiFi and a bunch of other stuff around it.
I'm not just an r/c pilot I'm also a ham radio operator.