Air Traffic Control for Delivery Drones

Air Traffic

Control for

Delivery Drones

ENGINEERS

ARE FIGURING

OUT HOW

TO LET DRONES

FLY BEYOND

VISUAL RANGE

IN 2013, SHORTLY BEFORE CHRISTMAS,

Amazon.com released a video depicting its

plans to speed packages to their destinations

using small drones. Some commentators

said it was just a publicity stunt. But the

notion began to seem less far-fetched when

Google revealed its own drone-based delivery

effort in 2014, something it calls Project

Wing. And in the early months of 2016, DHL

actually integrated drones into its logistics

network, albeit in an extremely limited way—

delivering packages to

a single mountaintop in

Germany that is difficult to

access by car in winter.

“It started to get momentum

after serious players

came in,” says Parimal

Kopardekar, NASA’s

senior engineer for air

transportation systems,

who has been researching

ways to work these buzzing

little contraptions

into an air traffic control

system created for fullsize

aircraft. “We need to

accommodate drones.”

This past August, the U.S.

Federal Aviation Administration

(FAA) introduced

Part 107, also known as

the Small UAS Rule, which

allows companies to use

small drones in the daytime

(or during twilight)

and within visual line of

sight of the pilot, so long

as they are not flown over

people who aren’t participating

in these operations.

This year promises to

see the FAA’s drone rules

loosen even more. At the

InterDrone conference in

Las Vegas this past September,

FAA head Michael

Huerta explained that his

agency was drafting rules

to allow drones to be flown

over random bystanders

(the FAA calls them “nonparticipants”)

and that it

plans to release proposed

regulations to that effect

by the end of 2016. “We’re

also working on a proposal

that would allow people to

fly drones beyond visual

line of sight,” he said. Such

a move would open the

door to the use of small    drones to deliver packages,

among other things.

Of course, when you

start flying drones where

you can’t see them, you

need to put technology

in place to be sure that

they don’t hit anything or

injure anybody. While the

details of how exactly to

do that remain to be hammered

out, there is no

shortage of ideas.

One of the companies

working on this challenge

is PrecisionHawk, based

in Raleigh, N.C. It’s one

of just two companies to

have obtained a waiver

from the FAA allowing it

to fly small drones beyond

the operator’s visual line

of sight. For such flights,

the FAA does, however,

require that an observer

be posted to look out for

full-scale aircraft.

Still, the waiver

increases the range of the

company’s drone operations

from how far away

you can see a small aerial

vehicle—typically a kilometer

or less—to how far

away you can see a fullsize

plane—6 to 7 kilometers.

The waiver does

not allow “a 200-mile

straight-line flight from A

to B,” notes Thomas Haun

of PrecisionHawk. Nevertheless,

he’s heartened

by the “much broader

area” the exception permits.

The engineers at

PrecisionHawk obtained

that waiver in part because

it had created a system to

help drone pilots safely

operate a vehicle that they

can’t directly see.

Avoiding a collision

with a full-size aircraft is

job No. 1, of course. But

the more typical danger

is much more mundane—

running into a tree

or a wall. To avoid that,

PrecisionHawk uses satellite

imagery to create

a detailed terrain model,

one of sufficient resolution

to capture how high

each tree and building

is. Its system continually

updates that model as new

satellite imagery becomes

available. Flight-planning

software or even the autopilot

on the drone itself

can then use this information

to avoid obstacles.

PrecisionHawk has also

worked out a mechanism

for drone operators to get

updates through Verizon’s

cellular network on the

location of full-size aircraft—

the same sort of

information that air traffic

controllers have. And

PrecisionHawk’s drones

report their positions over

that same wireless network,

so air traffic controllers

and pilots can, in

principle, know where

these machines are. “What

we’re providing as a product

is primarily the software

and data,” says Tyler

Collins, the creator of this

system, which goes by the

acronym LATAS (Low Altitude

Traffic and Airspace

Safety). “We want LATAS

on every drone.”

PrecisionHawk’s system

mimics the strategy that is

increasingly being used to

manage full-size aircraft,

whereby those aircraft

determine their positions

using GPS or some other

form of satellite navigation

and broadcast that

information by radio to

everyone else. The equipment

for this form of air

traffic management, called

ADS-B (for Automatic

Dependent Surveillance-

Broadcast), will be mandatory

on most U.S. aircraft

by 2020.

While it might seem

sensible to include small

drones in the upcoming

ADS-B regime, doing so

could easily overwhelm

that system, given the

huge and growing number

of drones—they’re selling

at a rate of about 2 million

a year in the United

States alone, according to

the FAA. With those numbers

growing so fast, an

independent scheme for

drone-traffic management

seems inevitable.

NASA, Google, and

Amazon have all been

contemplating what such

a system should entail.

While the concepts that

have been outlined vary

in many ways, they are

all similar in that they

would restrict drones to

the first few hundred feet

above the ground and to

locations that are well

separated from any airports—

that is, to parts of

the sky full-size aircraft

rarely visit.

At an airport in Reno,

Nev., this past October,

NASA and various industry

partners carried out trials

meant to help establish

detailed technical requirements

for a drone trafficmanagement

system, one

that would allow deliveries

like the one depicted in

that 2013 Amazon video.

So whether or not it was

a publicity stunt, perhaps

this indeed is what

the future holds. Haun

of PrecisionHawk says,

“We actually don’t think

the future is very far off.