Air-Traffic Control for Drones - Gov't is Asking for Ideas
Google Wants a Piece of Air-Traffic Control for Drones
by Alan Levin
July 24, 2015 — 2:00 AM PDT
Google Inc., the company that brought order to the
Internet, has set its sights on doing the same for the flocks of commercial
drones expected to someday clog the skies.
The search-engine pioneer is joining some of the biggest
companies in technology, communications and aviation -- including Amazon.com
Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Harris Corp. -- in trying to create an
air-traffic control system to prevent mid-air collisions.
But don’t expect a big federally operated network of
control towers. The government hasn’t said who will run the system or how it
will operate, and is asking for ideas.
“We think the airspace side of this picture is really not
a place where any one entity or any one organization can think of taking
charge,” Dave Vos, who heads Google’s secretive Project Wing, told Bloomberg
News in his most expansive comments on Google’s vision to date. “The idea being
that it’s not ‘Google is going to go out and build a solution and everyone else
has to subscribe to it.’ The idea really is anyone should be free to build a
solution.”
At least 14 companies, including Google, Amazon, Verizon
and Harris, have signed agreements with NASA to help devise the first
air-traffic system to coordinate small, low-altitude drones, which the agency
calls the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management. More than 100 other
companies and universities have also expressed interest in the project, which
will be needed before commercial drones can fly long distances to deliver
goods, inspect power lines and survey crops.
NASA Conference
Many will attend a NASA-sponsored conference next week on
how it should work. The goal is to eventually create a fully automated robotic
ballet in the sky, with computers instructing drones to move around
obstructions and each other.
Whether the system will be privately or publicly run --
or even if it will be a single system -- hasn’t been decided.
To the winners will go a foothold in an emerging
multibillion-dollar economy of unmanned flying machines. That’s helped attract
venture capital firms like Accel Partners, Intel Corp.’s investment arm and
Millennium Technology Value Partners.
“They definitely see it as an economic opportunity and as
something that they want to participate in,” Brian Wynne, president of the
Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said. “This is real
magic.”
Vos said he foresees a day when thousands of drones, all
within a few hundred feet of the ground, will routinely ply the skies above
cities -- reducing pollution by taking traffic off the streets. That could
easily dwarf traditional aircraft flights, which max out at 10,000 to 12,000 at
a time over the U.S.
Computer Networks
Google called competitors and government agencies to its
own conference in June to share its vision of air-traffic control. The
foundation of any system must be the ability to trust that all participants
will reliably identify themselves and their locations, Vos said. The airspace
must be open to any drones willing to follow the rules.
Networks of computers on the ground and in the air will
set routes that avoid mid-air collisions. Humans will still be in charge, but
unlike the current air-traffic system, controllers must rely on computers to
make the split-second decisions necessary to keep drone traffic flowing and
safe, he said.
Vos envisions a decentralized system with multiple
private operators, most likely overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Amazon has been tight-lipped about what it wants in a
drone air-traffic system. Gur Kimchi, vice president of the company’s drone
delivery division, Amazon Prime Air, issued a statement saying everyone in the
industry “must work together.” Kimchi, who will deliver a key-note speech on
July 28 at NASA’s conference, said he would discuss more details then.
Recent Demonstration
PrecisionHawk, a Raleigh, North Carolina, drone company
with about 100 employees, began developing its own drone traffic control system
because the large agriculture and oil companies it flies for wanted something
to keep tabs on unmanned flights. “Our clients need it,” Tyler Collins, the
program’s director, said.
In a recent demonstration over a North Carolina cattle
farm, Collins and his team intentionally steered a quad-copter drone toward an
imagined crop duster at work on an adjacent farm, the kind of hazardous
scenario PrecisionHawk employees have seen in the real world.
Within seconds an alert popped up on the operator’s
smartwatch: “WARNING, nearing no-fly zone.” When the operator ignored the
warning, an autopilot took over and flew the whirring machine back to safety.
PrecisionHawk’s system can automatically block its drones
from flying into danger, such as around airports and other aircraft. And it
makes a drone’s real-time flight track available so others can stay away.
Skydio, Airware
Skydio Inc., a Menlo Park, California, company founded a
year ago, is developing arrays of tiny cameras mounted on drones and linked to
computer chips that automatically guide them around trees, power lines and
other obstructions, Chief Executive Officer Adam Bry said. San Francisco-based
Airware and DroneDeploy are creating computer networks capable of showing where
drones are operating.
After putting out word last year that NASA wanted help on
its small-drone control system, 126 companies expressed interest, said NASA’s
Parimal Kopardekar, the project manager.
Will fiercely independent recreational fliers be required
to adhere to new rules? How will the system handle rogue operators?
“We think through collaboration we can collectively
decide on the right requirements faster,” he said.
Kopardekar envisions a tiered system of tighter and tighter
controls as drone traffic ramps up. If a drone pilot wants to fly over a remote
farm, all he or she might need to do is file a notice to a centralized computer
system. As unmanned flights become denser, the cloud-based system would need to
track drones to ensure they wouldn’t collide, just as radar follows traditional
aircraft now, he said.
Drone Detection
He’s also contemplating drone-detection systems to ensure
that stealth unmanned aircraft (such as the one that landed on the White House
lawn Jan. 26) can be tracked. Kopardekar envisions turning over the design to
the Federal Aviation Administration.
Just how all this will happen isn’t yet known, let alone
who will pay for it or operate it. That has left a lot of room for jockeying
among the players, according to Gary Church, president of Aviation Management
Associates Inc., who has consulted on drone-related projects for a decade.
Will drones be tracked by the same equipment the FAA has
ordered traditional aircraft to install by 2020, known as ADS-B? If so, Harris,
which built FAA’s ADS-B tracking system and is also working with NASA, stands
to benefit.
Or will the nation’s cellular network be adapted for
drone monitoring? That may be a boon for Verizon and other mobile phone
companies.
Will fiercely independent recreational fliers, who are
now exempt from most drone regulations, be required to adhere to new rules? How
will the system handle rogue operators who don’t cooperate?
“It’s kind of a big problem statement, but we think it’s
quite tractable,” Vos said of the challenge. As long as “we force ourselves to
think collaboratively, we’re pretty convinced that the answers come out pretty
clearly.”
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