They’re robots. They fly. They’re watching you. And they’re
increasingly found everywhere: Yup, they’re drones. You may think you
know exactly what they are and what they do. You don’t.
Like lots of emerging technologies, drones are often misunderstood,
especially early in their existence. To help you navigate our brave new
world filled with swooping, buzzing, photo-snapping machines, we reached
out to some of the greatest experts in the field. We asked them, what
are the most bogus drone myths? What drives you crazy? What do you wish
you could shout from the rooftops? Here’s what they said.
1. They’re not actually called drones, nor quadcopters
Calling
them “drones” in the first place is a no-no, according to Vijay Kumar,
an engineering professor at the University of Pennsylvania. (He’s not
the only one who thinks so, either.) He and his research team work on aerial robots in his lab.
“The only thing that is drone-like about our robots is that they make
a continuous humming sound,” Kumar says. “If I was an airforce pilot
controlling a remotely piloted vehicle (which is what they are) and you
called it a drone, I would be insulted. I can’t think of anything in the
definition of a drone that is suggestive of what the pilot does.
Certainly the characterization the pilot does no work does not do him or
her justice.”
While we’re at it, Kumar also says calling a robot with four rotors a “quadcopter” is “just plain wrong English.”
“‘Quad’
refers to four. ‘Copter’ is short for helicopter. A quadcopter
describes four helicopters. A robot with four rotors is a helicopter,
perhaps a quadrotor helicopter. It is not a set of four rotorcrafts.”
2. The biggest danger from drones isn’t invasion of privacy
Kumar
admits that many people live in fear of camera-equipped drones. But the
problem is that the legislation designed to combat these supposed
privacy threats doesn’t actually deal with how RPVs actually work.
FAA regulations say you can’t fly personal drones above 400 feet over
personal property. But is keeping drones at, say, 410 feet any more
private? Your creepy neighbor leaning over your fence, taking photos
with his phone is a bigger threat to your privacy than anything, as well
as a more realistic one.
3. They’re not all killing machines
Drones
rose to mainstream public consciousness in the last decade as the US
started deploying them in conflict zones in the Middle East. This
offensive UAV warfare cultivated a bad rap that haunts the ‘bots to this
day.
“Drones are just a platform that we—the US—launch weapons from,” Mary
Cummings says. “People often want to blame drones for collateral damage
in war strikes, but there is no question that drones cause much less
collateral damage than if the US military were to use manned aircraft.
People want to blame the technology when it is policy that is the real
culprit.”
4. They can’t take down planes
Jet engines accidentally slurping up sky-high drones is unlikely, and the chances of it actually triggering a crash are even smaller.
Attorney Schulman points out that pilots have spotted model airplanes
in their vicinities for years, but it wasn’t until last year that the
FAA started requiring pilots and air traffic control to report all drone
sightings to a national security system. Of those 190 sightings,
Schulman points out that a lot of the media described these incidents as
“near misses.”
In a lot of these supposed “near misses,” Schulman
says that many of these sightings were from the ground, or in other
situations that didn’t pose a risk. In some cases, he says it wasn’t
even clear if a drone was what pilots sighted. It’s unlikely a drone
could even reach thousands of feet in the air—and even if they did,
newer models like the Phantom 3 come with geofencing that automatically
employs GPS to avoid swooping near airports.
5. You can’t hear them coming a mile away
While the name “drone” connotes constant insect-like humming, noisiness isn’t a trait you can assign to all flying robots.
“Commercial rotorcraft drones like those from DJI and 3DR are noisy
enough, and Bezos has been rumored to say ‘they’re too loud’ of his
current Amazon drones,” says Todd Humphreys, an assistant professor of
aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. His research
team at UT was the first to prove that UAVs can be commandeered via GPS
signals from an outside source.
“But fixed-wing powered gliders,
or rotorcraft in near free fall, can be as silent as a thief in the
night,” Humphreys says. “This point is relevant for those who hope to
detect drones by their acoustic signature, including the Secret Service
guarding the White House.”
That could be a problem for the
companies that already exist who promise to catch suspicious drones by
those very acoustic signatures—that is, the unique sounds that each type
of drone emits. Those kind of companies already exist in Japan and the US.
Reducing drone noisiness is one of the main goals in UAV technology:
Over in the UK, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds uses a tiny drone
with six electric motors to monitor Britain’s endangered bird species.
The society says that ambient noises like wind drown out the already
hushed robot so as to allow the drone to sneak up on the animals.
6. They don’t need a human controlling them
There
are lots of stories of supposedly-unsavory characters getting caught
flying drones near sensitive areas, like tourist-filled attractions,
from afar. But UAVs are becoming more and more autonomous in every sense
of the word. As in, there’s no human controlling them. “A UAV may
detect a target on the ground and automatically follow or track the
motion of the target without involvement of pilot,” Hugh Liu says. He’s a
professor at the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace
Studies. He just won $1.65 million from the Natural Sciences and
Engineering Research Council of Canada to train 150 new experts in using
UAVs for a range of tasks, like agricultural and environmental
monitoring.
We’re already seeing these autonomous capabilities in commercial drone prototypes, like this one that can be programmed to shadow the user automatically. DJI has a drone
that allows you to preprogram GPS waypoints you want the ‘bot to hit,
then let it go into the wild for a self-guided journey. And there’s
research being done by engineers like Kumar to get drones to
automatically follow one another—like bees or ants in a swarm following
each other, or birds flying in formation.
7. They are not toys
While some UAVs are indeed essentially RC toys, most aren’t. They’re fully-fledged robots, and should be treated as such.
Liu
says UAVs are “not just one vehicle,” but an “integrated system” chock
full of onboard sensors, flight actuators, and more. And like Kumar, Liu
prefers the term UAS (unmanned aerial system) over UAV (unmanned aerial
vehicle).
“The obvious example is, when one flies a model airplane, it’s a fun
sport to operate the machine,” says Liu. “When this machine is equipped
with camera, all of a sudden, we are wowed by the aerial photos. I do
prefer to use the term unmanned aerial system (UAS) rather than UAV to
indicate this ‘system’ perspective.”
8. Jamming their signals doesn’t take them down
Todd
Humphreys says that another myth he runs into a lot is the idea that we
can drop drones out of the sky by jamming their communication signals.
But he says almost all GPS-guided drones have a failsafe for just such
an event called “lost link protocol.” This protocol ensures that a
jammed drone will automatically guide itself to a safe, predesignated
location, which a hacker can’t change.“What’s more, drones can be configured to ignore communications from the
ground during flight,” he explains. “In this mode, no one, not even a
legitimate operator, could deter them from executing their mission. This
‘I can’t hear you’ mode might be attractive to vandals or terrorists
who want to turn their fixed-wing drone into a home-brew cruise missile.
This is essentially how the original drone, the V1 flying bomb,
operated.”
9. They won’t be delivering your mail (or your pizza) anytime soon
Many
people think drones will eventually buzz around neighborhoods and drop
packages on stoops like weird flying robotic milkmen. But such a world
is still be a way’s off.
Mary Cummings says delivery drones can’t go very far, and they don’t
do well at all in bad weather. She says we might see some in the future;
but that more likely we’ll see them used for search-and-rescue
missions. Drones already have already saved lost hikers, for example,
and there are plans to deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach areas or to deliver humanitarian aid in war zones.
But
it’s not going to be happening quickly. Cummings says: “We need a lot
of work in developing new air traffic control paradigms and also making
sure this new technology is robust in the face of weather and human ill
intent. My seven-year-old would definitely throw rocks at a drone trying
to land.”
No comments:
Post a Comment