However, Alphabet and Google are poised to step into the lucrative commercial delivery market and compete against Amazon, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service from a position of entrenched strength, suggested Gartner analyst Gerald Van Hoy.
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Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) is all for harnessing the power of drones but also wants the government to establish privacy rules.
The “Know Before You Fly” campaign was created by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) and the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) in partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to educate prospective users about the safe and responsible operation of drones.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said that drones could be used in place of humans when risky activities that put human lives at risk are involved.
He noted that the FAA has now registered more than 500,000 hobbyist drones in the past eight months.
Project Wing was conceived as a way to deliver defibrillator kits to heart attack victims and disaster relief aid to isolated areas, but will be used commercially to deliver goods to consumers in a similar way to Amazon’s proposed Prime Air service.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will start testing its Project Wing delivery drones in the United States, after being given permission by the White House on Tuesday.
The US Department of the Interior will deploy a training programme for the use of UAS in search and rescue operations and enable first-responders to deploy drones in critical life-saving situations. Routine commercial use of small drones got a green light from the Obama administration June 21, 2016, after years of struggling to write regulations that would both protect public safety and unleash the economic potential and societal benefits of the new technology. Through his work at Intel, Krzanich tests drones on factors such as collision avoidance and beyond line-of-sight flight capabilities.
To “promote the safe integration and innovate adoption” of UAVs, regulators said Project Wing would be able to conduct “operational research” at one of the six approved sites for testing.
NY will be chipping in $5 million to accelerate efforts to design and manufacture drones throughout the state. And some policy experts say that if the government doesn’t move faster, it could squander the country’s chance to become the global leader in this fast-growing industry.
The White House today also announced a research initiative at NASA to study sense-and-avoid technology in drones, in addition to the drone research it is already doing on drone air traffic management.
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He added that industry can showcase technology that can help advance policy in areas like safety beyond the line of sight, and that “working with the policymakers actually helps us so that we can look at a problem and look at it as an objective to address together”.
