Drones have been a key technology for militaries, hobbyists, and first responders for over a decade, with a significant increase in available range during that time. No longer limited to small quadcopters with insufficient battery life, drones have been aiding search and rescue efforts, transforming wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and delivering urgent medical supply packages. Billions of dollars are invested in building the next generation of fully autonomous systems.
These developments raise a number of questions: Are drones safe enough to fly in crowded neighborhoods and cities? Is its use by police, flying over events or protests, a violation of privacy? Who decides what level of drone autonomy is acceptable in war zones?
Such questions are no longer hypothetical. Advances in drone technology and sensors, falling prices and loosening regulations have made them cheaper, faster and more powerful than ever. Here are four of the biggest changes coming to drone technology in the near future.
Police drone fleets
Currently, more than 1,500 US police departments have drone programs, according to a survey by Atlas of Surveillance. Trained police pilots use the equipment for search and rescue operations, monitoring events, crowds and other purposes. For example, the Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona successfully used a drone to locate a lost elderly man who had dementia, says Scottsdale Police Assistant Chief Rich Slavin. He says the department has had useful, if limited, experience with the devices so far, and that its pilots have often been limited by the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “line of sight” rule. The guideline stipulates that pilots must be able to see their drones at all times, which severely limits their range.
This will change soon. In the coming months, Scottsdale police will install a new police drone on a rooftop somewhere in the city, capable of autonomous takeoff, flight and landing. Slavin says the department is seeking an exemption from the FAA so it can fly its tool beyond line of sight. (Hundreds of law enforcement agencies have received an FAA waiver since the first one was granted in 2019.) The drone, which can fly up to 57 miles per hour, will fly missions up to three miles from its docking station, and the department says it it will be used for things like tracking suspects or providing a visual feed of an officer stopped in traffic while waiting for backup.
“The FAA has taken a much more progressive approach to how we’re entering this field,” says Slavin. This could mean that, across the country, the sight (and sound) of a police drone flying overhead will become much more common.
The Scottsdale department says the equipment, in the process of being purchased by Aerodome, will kickstart its drone program as a first line of response, as well as play a role in the department’s new “real-time surveillance center.” These types of centers are becoming increasingly common in U.S. policing, allowing cities to connect cameras, license plate readers, drones and other monitoring methods to monitor situations in real time. The emergence of the centers and their associated reliance on drones has drawn criticism from privacy advocates, who point to excessive surveillance with little transparency about the use or sharing of images from drones and other sources.
In 2019, the Chula Vista, California police department was the first to receive an FAA exemption to fly beyond line of sight. The program drew criticism from community members, who claimed the department was not transparent about the images collected or how they would be used.
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says the exemptions intensify existing privacy issues related to drones. If the FAA continues to grant them, police departments will be able to cover a much larger area of a city with this technology than ever before, while the legal landscape is murky when asked whether this would constitute an invasion of privacy.
“If we accumulate different uses of this technology, we will end up in a world where, from the moment you walk out the front door, you will feel like you are under the constant gaze of law enforcement authorities from the sky,” he says. “It may have some real benefits, but it also needs strong control and balance urgently.”
Scottsdale police say the drone could be used in a variety of scenarios, such as responding to a robbery in progress or tracking a driver suspected of being connected to a kidnapping. However, the real benefit, according to Slavin, will come from combining the device with other existing technologies, such as automatic license plate readers and the hundreds of cameras installed throughout the city. “It can get places very, very quickly,” he says. “This gives us real-time intelligence and helps us respond faster and more intelligently.”
Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), says the exemptions intensify existing privacy issues related to drones. If the FAA continues to grant them, police departments will be able to cover a much larger area of a city with this technology than ever before, while the legal landscape is murky when asked whether this would constitute an invasion of privacy.
“If we accumulate different uses of this technology, we will end up in a world where, from the moment you walk out the front door, you will feel like you are under the constant gaze of law enforcement authorities from the sky,” he says. “It may have some real benefits, but it also needs strong control and balance urgently.”
Scottsdale police say the drone could be used in a variety of scenarios, such as responding to a robbery in progress or tracking a driver suspected of being connected to a kidnapping. However, the real benefit, according to Slavin, will come from combining the device with other existing technologies, such as automatic license plate readers and the hundreds of cameras installed throughout the city. “It can get places very, very quickly,” he says. “This gives us real-time intelligence and helps us respond faster and more intelligently.”
Drone deliveries, again
Perhaps no drone technology is more hyped than home deliveries. For years, technology companies have made futuristic projections of one of them delivering a package to your door within hours of ordering. However, at least in the US, they have never been able to expand them much beyond small-scale pilot projects, and most often due to FAA line-of-sight rules.
But this year, regulatory changes are coming. Like police departments, Amazon’s Prime Air program was previously restricted to flying its drones within the pilot’s line of sight. This is because pilots don’t have radar, air traffic controllers, or any of the other systems that commercial flights rely on to monitor the airways and keep them safe. To compensate, Amazon spent years developing an onboard system that would allow its drones to detect nearby objects and avoid collisions. The company says it demonstrated to the FAA that its devices could fly safely in the same airspace as helicopters, planes and hot air balloons.
In May, Amazon announced that the FAA had granted it a waiver and permission to expand its operations in Texas, more than a decade after the Prime Air project began. And in July, the FAA cleared yet another hurdle by allowing two companies – Wipline and Google’s Wing Aviation – flew in the same airspace simultaneously without the need for visual observers.
While all of this means that your chances of receiving a package via drone have increased somewhat, the most attractive application may be medical deliveries. Shakiba Enayati, assistant professor of supply chains at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, spent years researching how this equipment could carry out the last stage of deliveries for vaccines, antidotes, organs and blood to remote locations. She said her studies have found that drones are a game-changer for getting medical supplies to vulnerable populations, and if the FAA extends these regulatory changes, it could have a real impact.
This is even a fact in the moments before an organ transplant, she says. Before it can be transmitted to a recipient, several blood tests must be sent back and forth to ensure the recipient can accept it, which can be a waste of time if the blood is transported by car or even by helicopter. “In these cases, time is running out,” says Enayati. If drones were allowed to be used at scale at this stage, this would be a significant improvement.
“If technology supports the demands of organ supply, it will make a huge change in such an important area,” he says.
This process could be faster than using drones to deliver the actual organs, which need to be transported under strictly controlled conditions to preserve them.
Internalizing the drone supply chain
Signed in December last year, the American Security Drone Act prevents federal agencies from purchasing drones from countries that pose a potential threat to the national security of the United States, such as Russia and China. This has a huge impact. China is the undisputed leader in manufacturing drones and their parts, and more than 90% of the equipment used by US law enforcement agencies is manufactured by Shenzhen-based DJI. Furthermore, many drones used by both sides in the war in Ukraine are manufactured by Chinese companies.
The American Security Drone Act is part of an effort to reduce this dependence on China. (Meanwhile, the eastern country has tightened export restrictions on drones for military uses.) As part of the legislation, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit created the Blue UAS Cleared List, a list of devices and parts which the agency investigated and approved for purchase. The list applies to federal agencies as well as programs that receive federal funding, which generally means state police departments or other non-federal agencies.
Because the U.S. is expected to spend such significant amounts on these technologies—with $1 billion earmarked for the Department of Defense’s Replicator initiative alone—getting on the Blue UAS Cleared List is a big deal. This means that these federal agencies can make vast purchases with little bureaucracy.
Allan Evans, CEO of Unusual Machine, a US-based drone parts manufacturer, says the list has caused a significant increase in drone companies trying to adapt to US standards. His business makes a first-person view flight controller, something he hopes will become the first of its kind to be approved for the Blue List.
The American Security Drone Act is unlikely to affect private purchases in the US of equipment used by cameramen, amateurs or for racing, which will still be mostly manufactured by China-based organizations such as DJI. This means that any U.S.-based drone company, at least in the short term, will only survive by serving the national defense market.
“It will basically be a loss for any company in the United States that is not willing to have auxiliary involvement in defense work,” says Evans.
The coming months will show the true impact of the Act; As the U.S. fiscal year ends in September, Evans says he expects to see a number of agencies spend their “use it or lose it” funding on U.S.-made drones and their components next month. “This will indicate whether the market exists or not, and how much money has actually been invested in it,” he says.
Autonomous weapons in Ukraine
The drone war in Ukraine has largely been a war of attrition. Since the beginning of conflicts, technology has been used extensively to disrupt monitoring, locate and track targets or provide weapons, however, on average, quadcopters last only three flights before being shot down or becoming impossible to control due to blockage of the aircraft. GPS. As a result, both Ukraine and Russia prioritized accumulating large volumes of drones with the expectation that they would not last long in battle.
Now, they are forced to rethink that approach, according to Andriy Dovbenko, founder of UK-Ukraine Tech Exchange, a nonprofit that supports raising capital for startups involved in the war effort and eventual reconstruction of Ukraine. Working with manufacturers in Ukraine, he says, he has seen demand for technology shift from huge shipments of simple commercial models to an urgent need for versions that can fly autonomously in space where GPS is blocked. With 70% of front lines suffering from interference, according to Dovbenko, both Russian and Ukrainian investments in the resource are currently focused on autonomous systems.
This is no small feat. In general, drone pilots rely on video feeds of the object as well as GPS technology, and neither of these are available in a congested environment. Instead, autonomous models operate with various types of sensors, such as LiDAR, to fly overhead, although this can be complicated in fog or other adverse weather conditions. Autonomous versions are a new, rapidly evolving technology that is still being tested by US-based companies such as Shield AI. The evolving war in Ukraine has raised expectations and pressure to deploy autonomous, affordable and reliable drones.
The transition to autonomous weapons also raises serious, but mostly unanswered, questions about the extent to which humans should be removed from the decision-making cycle. As the war rages on and the need for more powerful weaponry increases, Ukraine is likely to be the testing ground for whether and how the moral line will be drawn. But Dovbenko says that during an ongoing war, it is impossible to stop in order to find that line.
(fonte: MIT Technology Review )
