Kimchi sketched out one potentially unsafe situation, and how a network like the one Amazon envisions would prevent a mishap: What if a homeowner happens to be having a package delivered at the same time their real estate agent had planned to shoot a sales video of the home with a drone? During a conference at NASA’s Ames Research Center, the e-commerce company proposed setting aside a chunk of the world’s airspace exclusively for drone aircraft.
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Amazon, for one, is pressing the FAA for permission to one day fly its drones far beyond the location of its operator, an absolute necessity if it’s to succeed in its future plan to use quadcopters to deliver small items to its customers.
Amazon suggests divvying up airspace access based on a drone’s mission and capabilities.
Amazon laid out plans to create a set of rules to govern the operation of commercial drones at a conference on Tuesday.
“The uptake of drones means that regulation will need to change to adapt; however, given the utility of personal-use application of drones, regulation must be careful not to regulate commercial use in such a way that drones become too costly to deploy and inaccessible to consumers, as this will in turn create a bar to their usage and adoption”, he said to The Verge. It calls for a “paradigm shift” that will allow hundreds of thousands of small unmanned aircraft to fly under their own technological steam without the current involvement of humans through air traffic control.
A host of technology firms including the likes of search engine major Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) are jockeying to get a piece of the “Unmanned Aerial System” segment in the U.S. “Unmanned systems” is the technical name for the soon-to-be ubiquitous “commercial drones”. Drones equipped with collision-avoidance technology and reliable links to the traffic-management system would be able to fly in the high-speed zone between 200 feet and 400 feet. Given this projected growth, Amazon believes responsibility for traditional air services such as navigation and air traffic control must be delegated. So long as the data showing where drones are flying is sent to the central computer system, any company should be allowed to participate, Kimchi said. Implementation of such a system would likely require support from Congress or the FAA.
Details about how Amazon’s proposed delivery drones may work have been published by the US Patent Office earlier this year.
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Amazon is advocating a tiered system that would let everybody from hobbyists to the most sophisticated operators fly.
