Originally posted at Justice
in Time.
It sometimes feels like every other new project on Kickstarter is a
drone (or “unmanned aerial vehicle”) of some kind. A crop of drones
have popped up, and are now following you with HD cameras as you
pull off tricks on your BMX bike. If you want something
remote-controlled, you could buy a palm-sized plastic quadcopter
from a bargain bin in your local toy store.
Remotely piloted helicopters and model planes have been available
for decades, but recent advances in artificial intelligence and
simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) algorithms have made
autonomous drones more useful and exciting to tinker with. In the
United States, the hobby of flying small vehicles has been
effectively unregulated. The FAA provides some “guidance” for
operating model aircraft for recreation under Section 366 of Public
Law 112-95 (the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012) but this
is technically not a “regulation”. The FAA apply a light touch and
defer to community-defined conventions for the personal use of model
aircraft.
As drones become cheaper and easier to pilot, many hobbyists are
discovering opportunities to make money everywhere they look. As
many as 30% of hobbyist pilots are looking for ways to turn a
profit. Many hobbyists have tried their hands at taking photos and
videos for weddings, mapping buildings for real estate listings, and
even surveying entire fields for tracking crops and livestock. The
FAA is very permissive of recreational drone piloting, but if you
try to turn your hobby into a business venture, they will come down
on you as hard as an octocopter that has run out of battery. Jayson
Hanes from Lutz, Florida received a stern letter from the FAA
because the recreational videos filmed from his drone were uploaded
to YouTube and had some commercials autoplay before them. Even if
your drone was flown for recreational purposes but filmed something
newsworthy, you could not sell that footage to a news service
because that would make the drone flight retroactively commercial.
Until last year, the FAA treated all commercial flights of unmanned
aerial vehicles as if they were manned. This included requiring all
vehicles to be individually registered and licenced, which could
take months, and all flights to be individually approved with
submitted flight plans. If you were building an autonomous drone and
were testing your changes to the AI iteratively, you would need to
submit a new flight plan for each test flight after each minor
change to the source code. In the tech industry, where companies can
fail if they are days behind their competitors, the slow approval
process for commercial drones would dampen the spirits of anyone to
build a speedy startup out of them.
Companies such as Amazon have had to take their experimental
projects overseas. Amazon’s Prime Air announcement video was filmed
in Canada and a lot of the development and testing of their delivery
drones has needed to be done outside of the United States.
Since last year, the FAA has been thawing in response to the ardent
hobbyist community looking to make a living off their tinkering and
piloting skills. In March, the FAA announced that companies that
already had commercial drone licences were no longer required to
submit flight plans for flights below a ceiling of 200 feet, as long
as they remained within line-of-sight of the operator. In May, the
FAA made further announcements that some companies were going to be
allowed to operate outside of that line-of-sight and even one
company was allowed to fly drones in urban areas.
It will still be a few years before the FAA regulation of commercial
drones starts to settle into something accessible and reasonable.
The impending future of clouds of autonomous drones swarming through
our skies will have to wait. Until then, we can watch quirky music
videos straight filmed with commercial drones, even if we had to
send OK Go to Japan to make them.
.png){kind=link}
