Chapter 13

IN THIS CHAPTER

Distinguishing between military and civilian drones

Discovering the possible uses of drones

Determining what AI could allow drones to achieve

Acknowledging regulations and limitations of drone operability

Drones are mobile robots that move in the environment by flying around. Initially connected to warfare, drones have become a powerful innovation for leisure, exploration, commercial delivery, and much more. However, military development still lurks behind developments and causes concern from many AI experts and public figures who foresee them as possibly unstoppable killing machines.

Flying is something that people have done since the Wright brothers first flew on December 17, 1903 (see https://tinyurl.com/3pnfzkv9). However, humans have always wanted to fly, and as far back as ancient times, legendary thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci, a Renaissance genius, put their minds to the task (see this article from the Smithsonian Museum: https://tinyurl.com/45kktr55.) Nowadays, flying technology is advanced, so drones are more mature than other mobile robots because the key technology to make them work is well understood. The drones’ frontier is to incorporate AI. Moving by flying poses some important limits on what drones can achieve, such as the weight they can carry or the actions they can take when arriving at a destination.

This chapter discusses the present state of drones: consumer, commercial, and military. It also explores the roles drones might play in the future. These roles for drones depend partly on integration with AI solutions, which will give them more autonomy and extended capabilities in moving and operating.

Acknowledging the State of the Art

Drones are mobile robots that fly. This type of robot has existed for a long time, especially for military uses (where the technology originated). The official military name for such flying machines is Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), which includes the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and the associated support systems. More commonly, the public knows such mobile robots as “drones” because their sound resembles the male bee, but you won’t find the term in many official papers because officials prefer names like UAS; or Unmanned Aerial Combat Vehicles (UACV); or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV); or even RPA (Remotely Piloted Aircraft).

There is a lot in a name. This article from ABC News can help you understand common acronyms and official names reserved for drones: https://tinyurl.com/mvv3f9yf.

Flying unmanned to missions

Resembling a standard airplane (but generally in smaller form), military drones are flying wings; that is, they have wings and one or more propellers (or jet engines) and to some extent aren’t very different from airplanes that civilians use for travel. The military versions of drones are now in their sixth generation, as described at https://tinyurl.com/5ay5auaj. Military drones are unmanned and remotely controlled using satellite communications, even from the other side of the earth. Military drone operators acquire telemetry information and vision as transmitted from the drone they control, and the operators can use that information to operate the machine by issuing specific commands. Some military drones perform surveillance and recognizance tasks, and thus they simply carry cameras and other devices to acquire information. Others are armed with weapons and can carry out deadly attacks on objectives. Some of the deadliest of these aircraft match the capabilities of manned aircraft (see https://tinyurl.com/sbahk6ps) and can travel anywhere on earth — even to places where a pilot can’t easily go (https://tinyurl.com/2m2exx47).

Military drones have a long history. Just when they began is a topic for much debate, but the Royal Navy began using drone-like planes for target practice in the 1930s (see  https://tinyurl.com/564749wp for details). The US used actual drones regularly as early as 1945 for targets (see https://tinyurl.com/5y2xwnkj for details). Starting in 1971, researchers began to apply hobbyist drones to military purposes. John Stuart Foster, Jr., a nuclear physicist who worked for the U.S. government, had a passion for model airplanes and envisioned the idea of adding weapons to them. That led to the development of two prototypes by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1973, but the use of similar drones in the past decade by Israel in Middle Eastern conflicts was what spurred interest in and further development of military drones. Interestingly enough, 1973 is the year that the military first shot a drone down, using a laser, of all things (see the Popular Science article at https://tinyurl.com/3x82766u and a Popular Mechanics article at https://tinyurl.com/ymjxfna5 for details). The first drone killing occurred in 2001 in Afghanistan (see https://tinyurl.com/3363ftdy). Of course, a human operator was at the other end of the trigger then.

Recent efforts by the militaries of the world lean toward supplying drones with AI capabilities and more sensors. (A wide spectrum of sensors is being tested, including optical, thermal, and electromagnetic.) The challenge is twofold. First, scientists are working to increase the autonomy of unmanned devices sent to the battlefield, because the enemy could disturb or jam communications. Military experts are also working on how to increase the trust of operators and commanders that will send the AI to fight. (Trust is essential to empower the drone with the appropriate role in the fighting.)

An example of such efforts is DARPA’s Gremlin project, which consists of a range of unmanned reusable drones (see https://tinyurl.com/p7smus7w for more details). These new drones feature the capabilities for

· Multiple deployments

· Use as a swarm asset

· Use for surveillance, reconnaissance, and intelligence

· Autonomous attack after target recognition

· The ability to continue fighting when communications with headquarters are cut off

The key reason for employing unmanned drones in the battlefield in the future is their capability to operate in swarms. Swarms require smaller (and thus harder to detect and hit) drones. Will Roper, the 13th assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, explains the technology and logistics in this interview: https://tinyurl.com/7bez5rnn.

People debate whether to give military drones AI capabilities. Some feel that doing so would mean that drones could bring destruction and kill people through their own decision-making process. However, AI capabilities could also enable drones to more easily evade destruction or perform other nondestructive tasks, just as AI helps guide cars today. It could even steady a pilot’s movements in harsh weather, similar to how the da Vinci system works for surgeons (see the “Assisting a surgeon” section of Chapter 7 for details). Presently, military drones with killing capabilities are also controversial because the AI would tend to make the act of war abstract and further dehumanizing, reducing it to images transmitted by drones to their operators and to commands issued remotely. Yes, the operator would still make the decision to kill by unleashing the drone, but the drone would perform the actual act, distancing the operator from responsibility for the act even more than when a pilot drops bombs from a plane.

Discussions about military drones are essential in this chapter because they interconnect with the development of civilian drones and influence much of the present discussion on this technology through public opinion. Also, giving military drones full autonomy inspires stories about an AI apocalypse that have arisen outside the sci-fi field and become a concern for the public. For a more detailed technical overview of models and capabilities, see this article by Deutsche Welle: https://tinyurl.com/ntwvae68.

Meeting the quadcopter

Many people first heard about consumer and hobbyist quadcopter drones, and then about commercial quadcopter drones (such as the one employed by Amazon that is discussed at https://tinyurl.com/chwnsfn3) through the mobile phone revolution. Most military drones aren’t of the copter variety today, but you can find some, such as the Duke University TIKAD drone described at https://tinyurl.com/yu9sdms2 and demonstrated at https://tinyurl.com/v3432za. The military copter drones actually started as hobbyist prototypes (see https://tinyurl.com/vknd9v7u for details).

However, mobile phones were integral to making all this work. As mobile phones got smaller, their batteries also became smaller and lighter. Mobile phones also carry miniaturized cameras and wireless connectivity — all features that are needed in a contemporary drone. A few decades ago, small drones had a host of limitations:

· They were radio controlled using large command sets.

· They needed a line of sight (or you would have flown blind).

· They were fixed-wing small airplanes (with no hovering capability).

· They ran on noisy diesel or oil engines, limiting their range and user-friendliness.

Recently, lightweight lithium-polymer batteries have allowed drones to

· Run on smaller, quieter, and reliable electric motors

· Be controlled by wireless remote controls

· Rely on video feedback signals from the drones (no more line-of-sight requirement)

Drones also possess GPS, accelerometers, and gyroscopes now — all of which appear as part of consumer mobile phones. These features help control position, level, and orientation, something that’s useful for phone applications but also quite essential for flying drones.

Thanks to all these improvements, drones changed from being fixed-wing, airplane-like models to something similar to helicopters, but which use multiple rotors to lift themselves in the air and take a direction. Using multiple rotors creates an advantage. Contrary to helicopters, drones don’t need variable-pitch rotors for orientation. Variable-pitch rotors are more costly and difficult to control. Drones instead use simple, fixed-pitch propellers, which can emulate, as an ensemble, the same functions of variable-pitch rotors. Consequently, you now see multirotor drones: tricopter, quadcopter, hexacopter, and octocopter, respectively having 3, 4, 6, or 8 rotors to use. Among the different possible configurations, the quadcopter gained the upper hand and became the most popular drone configuration for commercial and civilian use. Because the quadcopter is based on four rotors (of small size), with each one oriented to a direction, an operator can easily turn and move the drone around by applying a different spin and speed to each rotor, as shown in Figure 13-1.

FIGURE 13-1: A quadcopter flies by opportunely spinning its rotors in the right directions.

Defining Uses for Drones

Each kind of drone type has current and futuristic applications, and consequently different opportunities to employ AI. The large and small military drones already have their parallel development in terms of technology, and those drones will likely see more use for surveillance, monitoring, and military action in the field. Experts forecast that military uses will likely extend to personal and commercial drones, which generally use different technology from the military ones. (Some overlap exists, such as Duke University’s TIKAD, which actually started life in the hobbyist world.)

Apart from rogue uses of small but cheap and easily customizable drones by insurgents and terrorists groups (for an example, see https://tinyurl.com/44wubsh8), governments are increasingly interested in smaller drones for urban and indoor combat. Indoor places, like corridors or rooms, are where intervention capabilities of aircraft-size Predator and Reaper military drones are limited (unless you need to take down the entire building). The same goes for scout drones, such as Ravens and Pumas, because these drones are made for the operations on the open battlefield, not for indoor warfare. (You can read about the possible military evolution of otherwise harmless consumer drones in this article:https://tinyurl.com/6nbp5hpj that also details some of the disadvantages of doing so.) The article at https://tinyurl.com/3mn7dc3x details some of the history behind the use of drones by Violent Non-State Actors (VNSAs). It has become possible for anyone with a grudge or different point of view to use drones to engage in terrorism even without the assets that a state has for doing so.

Commercial drones are far from being immediately employed from shop shelves onto the battlefield, although they offer the right platform for the military to develop various technologies using them. An important reason for the military to use commercial drones is that off-the-shelf products are mostly inexpensive compared to standard weaponry, making them both easily disposable and employable in swarms comprising large numbers of them. Easy to hack and modify, they require more protection than their already hardened military counterparts do (their communications and controls could be jammed electronically), and they need the integration of some key software and hardware parts before being effectively deployed in any mission.

Navigating in a closed space requires enhanced abilities to avoid collisions, to get directions without needing a GPS (whose signals aren’t easily caught while in a building), and to engage a potential enemy. Moreover, drones would need targeting abilities for reconnaissance (spotting ambushes and threats) and for taking out targets by themselves. Such advanced characteristics aren’t found in present commercial technology, and they would require an AI solution developed specifically for the purpose. Military researchers are actively developing the required additions to gain military advantage. Recent developments in nimble deep learning networks installed on a standard mobile phone, such as YOLO (https://tinyurl.com/u7hwu88u) or Google’s MobileNets (https://tinyurl.com/3rszbzsw and https://tinyurl.com/snf9va56), point out how fitting advanced AI into a small drone is achievable given the present technology advances.

Seeing drones in nonmilitary roles

Currently, commercial drones don’t have a lot to offer in the way of advanced functionality found in military models. A commercial drone designed for the consumer market could possibly take a snapshot of you and your surroundings from an aerial perspective, with some benefit such as an image stabilizer and a follow me feature (which enables the drone to follow you without your issuing any other specific command). However, commercial drones intended for specific usage in industry and service are also becoming more sophisticated. Being equipped with more sensors, AI, and sometimes even robotic arms, commercial drones are finding their way into many applications in advanced economies, where efficiency in productivity and automation are becoming paramount.

With such enhanced commercial drones, a few innovative uses will become quite common in the near future:

· Delivering goods in a timely fashion, no matter the traffic (being developed by Google X, Amazon, and many startups)

· Performing monitoring for maintenance and project management

· Assessing various kinds of damage for insurance

· Creating field maps and counting herds for farmers

· Assisting search-and-rescue operations

· Providing Internet access in remote, unconnected areas (an idea being developed by Facebook)

· Generating electricity from high-altitude winds

· Carrying people around from one place to another

Having goods delivered by a drone is something that grabbed the public’s attention early, thanks to promotion by large companies. One of the earliest and most recognized innovators is Amazon (which promises that a service, Amazon Prime Air, will become operative soon. Google promises a similar service with its Project Wing (https://tinyurl.com/3r6bfsyp). However, we may still be years away from having a feasible and scalable air delivery system based on drones. Even so, if you live in certain areas, like Virginia, you could get your Girl Scout cookies delivered by drone (https://tinyurl.com/dt3h4uma).

Even though the idea would be to cut intermediaries in the logistic chain in a profitable way, many technical problems and regulatory ambiguities remain to be solved. Behind the media hype showing drones successfully delivering small parcels and other items, such as pizza or burritos, at target locations in an experimental manner (https://tinyurl.com/f2kbfw4t), the truth is that drones can’t fly far or carry much weight. The biggest problem is one of regulating the flights of swarms of drones, all of which need to get an item from one point to another. There are obvious issues, such as avoiding obstacles like power lines, buildings, and other drones; facing bad weather; and finding a suitable spot to land near you. The drones would also need to avoid sensitive air space and meet all required regulatory requirements that aircraft meet. AI will be the key to solving many of these problems, but not all. For the time being, delivery drones seem to work fine on a small scale for more critical deliveries than having freshly made burritos at your home: https://tinyurl.com/kar9v9me and https://tinyurl.com/y4vn6nxx.

Drones can become your eyes, providing vision in situations that are too costly, dangerous, or difficult to see by yourself. Remotely controlled or semiautonomous (using AI solutions for image detection or processing sensor data), drones can monitor, maintain, surveil, or search and rescue because they can view any infrastructure from above and accompany and support on-demand human operators in their activities. For instance, drones have successfully inspected power lines, pipelines (https://tinyurl.com/42vxvdm5), and railway infrastructures (https://tinyurl.com/4833yxbv), allowing more frequent and less costly monitoring of vital, but not easily accessible, infrastructures. Even insurance companies find them useful for damage assessments and other purposes, such as inspecting the roof of your home before insuring it (https://tinyurl.com/2xr752ed).

Chasing crooks

Police forces and first-responders around the world have found drones useful for a variety of activities, from search-and-rescue operations to forest fire detection and localization, and from border patrol missions to crowd monitoring. Drones are already widespread in law enforcement and police are always finding newer ways to usefully employ them (https://tinyurl.com/phbr7xc), including finding traffic violators (see the article at https://tinyurl.com/4rrdy7x3).

Drones used by police are fitted with optical, zoom, and often also thermal cameras; therefore, they excel at surveillance and search from distance. This kind of aerial surveillance has proven to be the key to successfully solving a range of problems that law enforcers may encounter during their service, even though they’re extremely invasive.

Not only do drones keep an eye in the sky on highly frequented locations, as well as enforce surveillance in otherwise critical areas because of crowd and car traffic, but they are also becoming indispensable for apprehending suspected criminals. When chasing suspects, a drone can report their whereabouts and whether they’re carrying weapons while going unnoticed because of their low profile and low-noise engines. For instance, in this YouTube video, you can see how Daytona Beach police use a drone fitted with thermal camera to locate and seize a suspect after a burglary: https://tinyurl.com/44ynjpk3.

Finally, drones see use in many rescue situations, in which a bird’s-eye view can help locate people in distress better than a squad on the ground. UAV Coach, a drone community website, reports quite a few interesting stories of people saved by drones (see https://tinyurl.com/uf238b7f). Police are also increasingly using drones for assessments that could otherwise take time and require more personnel onsite. Such tasks range from mapping areas of interest, to documenting car accident and crime scenes, to mapping damages after a disaster.

Growing better crops

Agriculture is another important area in which drones are revolutionizing work. Not only can they monitor crops, report progress, and spot problems, but they apply pesticides or fertilizer only where and when needed, as described by MIT Technology Review (https://tinyurl.com/t5x6hsz2). Drones offer images that are more detailed and less costly to obtain than those acquired from an orbital satellite, and they can be employed to:

· Analyze soil and map the result using image analysis and 3-D laser scanners to make seeding and planting more effective

· Control planting by controlling tractor movements

· Monitor real-time crop growth

· Spray chemicals when and where needed

· Irrigate when and where needed

· Assess crop health using infrared vision, something a farmer can’t do

Precision agriculture uses AI capabilities for movement, localization, vision, and detection. Precision agriculture could increase agriculture productivity (healthier crops and more food for everyone) while diminishing costs for intervention (no need to spray pesticides everywhere).

Organizing warehouses

Other areas where drones also shine are in logistics and manufacturing operations. Drones operating in enclosed spaces can’t rely on GPS geolocation to determine where they are and where they’re going. Recent advances in visually-based navigation and other sensors have improved the ability of drones to navigate indoors, rendering them suitable to operate in the larger warehouse spaces necessary for global manufacturing operations and the trading of export goods.

In warehouses, drones seem particularly apt at checking inventories. Checking inventories and counting available parts and goods is a menial activity that usually requires a large amount of time and effort from warehouse workers. It can sometimes turn dangerous when it involves climbing to reach higher shelves. Drones can handle the task perfectly by using barcodes, QR codes, or radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology. In addition, drones can engage in intralogistics, which involves moving goods among different parts of the warehouse (though a drone is limited by how much weight it can carry).

Manufacturing is undergoing a technological transformation by using AI solutions in production and organization, resulting in smart factories. In general, the possible use cases for drones increases because of the large number of potential activities they enable:

· Replacing workers in risky operations or in less attractive activities

· Increasing workers’ productivity by supporting and speeding up their operations

· Saving costs by replacing more costly technology or methods

· Providing entry to inaccessible or difficult-to-reach places in the factory

Because of these reasons, market research companies like Gartner and Statista estimate that the number of drones sold for commercial purposes will increase every year and generate more revenue than consumer drones. Commercial drones are better equipped than consumer drones, and thus expensive. (You can read a comprehensive report at https://tinyurl.com/4x78rc9b.)

Drones can perform amazing feats in industries that you may never have thought about, ranging from communication to energy. The communications industry intends to move existing infrastructure to the sky using drones. Transportation plans to use drones to transport people, replacing common means of transportation, such as the car (https://tinyurl.com/uvnujv7k and https://tinyurl.com/45p7meex). Another possibility in the energy sector is to produce electricity up high where winds are stronger and no one will protest the rotor noise (https://tinyurl.com/34fhbvar).

For an updated and exhaustive list of actual uses of drones in various industries, you can skim through a complete list of 128 possible activities in 22 different areas compiled by dronegenuity, a company providing drone services: https://tinyurl.com/z72puwm5.

Powering up drones using AI

With respect to all drone applications, whether consumer, business, or military related, AI is both a game enabler and a game changer. AI allows many applications to become feasible or better executed because of enhanced autonomy and coordination capabilities. Raffaello D’Andrea, a Canadian/Italian/Swiss engineer, professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich, and drone inventor, demonstrates drone advances in this video: https://tinyurl.com/2utct3ff. The video shows how drones can become more autonomous by using AI algorithms. Autonomy affects how a drone flies, reducing the role of humans issuing drone commands by automatically handling obstacle detection and allowing safe navigation in complicated areas. Coordination implies the ability of drones to work together without a central unit to report to and get instructions from, making drones able to exchange information and collaborate in real time to complete any task.

Taken to its extreme, autonomy may even exclude any human guiding the drone so that the flying machine can determine the route to take and execute specific tasks by itself. (Humans issue only high-level orders.) When not driven by a pilot, drones rely on GPS to establish an optimal destination path, but that’s possible only outdoors, and it’s not always precise. Indoor usage increases the need for precision in flight, which requires increased use of other sensor inputs that help the drone understand proximity surrounds (the elements of a building, such as a wall protrusion, that could cause it to crash). The cheapest and lightest of these sensors is the camera that most commercial drones have installed as a default device. But having a camera doesn’t suffice because it requires proficiency in processing images using computer vision and deep learning techniques (discussed in this book, for instance, in Chapter 11 when discussing convolutional networks).

Companies expect autonomous execution of tasks for commercial drones, for instance, making them able to deliver a parcel from the warehouse to the customer and handling any trouble along the way. (As with robots, something always goes wrong that the device must solve using AI on the spot.) Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have recently tested automated drone flight against a high-skilled professional drone pilot (see https://tinyurl.com/panpurf9 for details). Interestingly, the human pilot had the upper hand in this test until he became fatigued, at which point the slower, steadier, and less error-prone drones caught up with him. In the future, you can expect the same as what happened with chess and Go games: Automated drones will outrun humans as drone pilots in terms of both flying skills and endurance.

We could take coordination to extremes as well, permitting hundreds, if not thousands, of drones to fly together. Such capability could make sense for commercial and consumer drones when drones crowd the skies. Using coordination would be beneficial in terms of collision avoidance, information sharing on obstacles, and traffic analysis in a manner similar to that used by partially or fully automated interconnected cars (Chapter 14 discusses AI-driven cars).

Rethinking existing drone algorithms is already going on, and some solutions for coordinating drone activities already exist. For instance, MIT developed a decentralized coordination algorithm for drones in 2016 (see https://tinyurl.com/cs5d4urk). Most research is, however, proceeding unnoticed because a possible use for drone coordination is military in nature. Drone swarms may be more effective in penetrating enemy defenses unnoticed and carrying out strike actions that are difficult to fend off. The enemy will no longer have a single large drone to aim at, but rather hundreds of small ones flying around. Fortunately, there are solutions for taking down drone swarms (see https://tinyurl.com/9app5ntc). A test on a swarm of 100 drones (model Perdix, a custom-made model for the United States Department of Defense) released from three F/A-18 Super Hornets and executing recognizance and intercept missions was made public (https://tinyurl.com/247xsepk), but other countries are also involved in this new arms race.

When entrepreneur Elon Musk, Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, physicist Stephen Hawking, and many other notable public figures and AI researchers raised alarms on recent AI weaponry developments, they didn’t think of robots as shown in films like Terminator or I, Robot, but rather of armed flying drones and other automated weapons. Autonomous weapons could start an arms race and forever change the face of warfare. You can discover more about this topic at https://tinyurl.com/a8ckvrm8.

Understanding regulatory issues

Drones are not the first and only things to fly over clouds, obviously. Decades of commercial and military fights have crowded the skies, requiring both strict regulation and human monitoring control to guarantee safety. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the organization with the authority to regulate all civil aviation, making decisions about airports and air traffic management. The FAA has issued a series of rules for the UAS (drones), and you can read those regulations at https://tinyurl.com/c355drrw.

The FAA issued a set of rules known as Part 107 in August 2016. These rules outline the use of commercial of drones during daylight hours. The rules come down to these five straightforward rules:

· Fly below 400 feet (120 meters) altitude.

· Fly at speeds less than 100 mph.

· Keep unmanned aircraft in sight all times.

· The operator must have an appropriate license.

· Never fly near manned aircraft, especially near airports.

UNDERSTANDING TEACHING ORIENTATION

Much of this book is about creating an environment and providing data so that an AI can learn. In addition, you spend a great deal of time considering what is and isn’t possible using an AI from a purely teaching perspective. Some parts of the book even consider morality and ethics as they apply to AI and its human users. However, the orientation of the teaching provided to an AI is also important.

In the movie WarGames (https://tinyurl.com/w6sf3edm), the War Operation Plan Response (WOPR) computer contains a strong AI capable of determining the best course of action in responding to a threat. During the initial part of the movie, WOPR goes from being merely an advisor to the executor of policy. Then along comes a hacker who wants to play a game: thermonuclear war. Unfortunately, WOPR assumes that all games are real and actually starts to create a plan to engage in thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union. The movie seems to be on the verge of confirming every worst fear that could ever exist regarding AI and war.

Here’s the odd part of this movie. The hacker, who is now found out and working for the good guys, devises a method to teach the AI futility. That is, the AI enters an environment in which it learns that winning some games — tic-tac-toe, in this case — isn’t possible. No matter how well one plays, in the end, the game ends in stalemate after stalemate. The AI then goes to test this new learning on thermonuclear war. In the end, the AI concludes that the only winning move is not to play at all.

Most of the media stories you hear, the sci-fi you read, and the movies you watch never consider the learning environment. Yet, the learning environment is an essential part of the equation, because how you configure the environment determines what the AI will learn. When dealing with military equipment, it’s probably a good idea to teach the AI to win, but also to show it that some scenarios simply aren’t winnable, so the best move is not to play at all.

· Never fly over groups of people, stadiums, or sporting events.

· Never fly near emergency response efforts.

The FAA will soon issue additional rules for drone flight at night that pertain to when it can be out of the line of sight and in urban settings, even though it’s currently possible to obtain special waivers from the FAA. The Operations Over People rule (https://tinyurl.com/4h88ea2j) became effective in April 2021 and it allows pilots that meet certain standards to fly at night over people and moving vehicles without waiver as long as they meet certain requirements. The purpose of such regulatory systems is to protect the public safety, given that the impact of drones on our lives still isn’t clear. These rules also allow innovation and economic growth to be derived from such a technology.

Presently, the lack of AI means that drones may easily lose their connection and behave erratically, sometimes causing damage. Consequently, you see articles like this one: https://tinyurl.com/bhh635xn that discuss what to do when your drone loses a connection. Even though most drones now have safety measures in case of a lost connection with the controller, such as having them automatically return to the exact point at which they took off, the FAA restricts their usage to staying within the line of sight of their controller unless the pilot meets certain criteria.

Another important safety measure is one called geo-fencing. Drones using GPS service for localization have software that limits their access to predetermined perimeters described by GPS coordinates, such as airports, military zones, and other areas of national interest. You can get the list of parameters at https://tinyurl.com/ar9yeazw or read more about this topic at https://tinyurl.com/ynw4f3cx.

Algorithms and AI are coming to the rescue by preparing a suitable technological setting for the safe usage of a host of drones that deliver goods in cities. NASA’s Ames Research Center is working on a system called Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management (UTM) that is playing the same air-traffic-control tower role for drones as we use for manned airplanes (see https://tinyurl.com/5595ndfw). However, this system is completely automated; it counts on the drones’ capabilities to communicate with each other. UTM will help identify drones in the sky (each one will have an identifier code, just like car license plates) and will set a route and a cruise altitude for each drone, thus avoiding possible collisions, misbehavior, or potential damage for citizens. You can read about the four levels of testing and the current progress of this initiative at https://www.nasa.gov/ames/utm.

When restrictions are not enough and rogue drones represent a menace, police and military forces have found a few effective countermeasures: taking the drone down by a shotgun; catching it by throwing a net; jamming its controls; taking it down using laser or microwaves; and even firing guided missiles at it.