Drones: From War Weapon To Homemade Toy

Eugen Leitl eugen at leitl.org
Thu Aug 2 07:30:49 PDT 2012


http://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/157441681/drones-from-war-weapon-to-homemade-toy


Drones: From War Weapon To Homemade Toy

by Larry Abramson

Morning Edition

 
A homemade drone over Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, Calif. Hobbyists and
commercial manufacturers are anticipating new rules governing their domestic
use.

Enlarge Larry Abramson/NPR

A homemade drone over Cesar Chavez Park in Berkeley, Calif. Hobbyists and
commercial manufacturers are anticipating new rules governing their domestic
use.

August 2, 2012

Drones transformed the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. But their use has
been extremely limited in U.S. skies. The Federal Aviation Administration
essentially bans the commercial use of drones, and government use is still
highly restricted.

But that's changing.

For a long time, drones, which are formally known as unmanned aerial
vehicles, or UAVs, were exotic, expensive and out of reach for all but
military users. Today, however, a clever hobbyist can have his own eye in the
sky.

That's the case for Andreas Oesterer and Mark Harrison. On a recent weekend,
the two hobbyists are flying their collection of hi-tech toys over Cesar
Chavez Park in Berkeley, Calif.

With a little push, a homemade UAV takes off into the sky. The fixed-wing
plane they've launched is definitely unarmed. In fact, it looks like a simple
remote-control plane you might find at RadioShack.

Hi-tech hobbyists Andreas Oesterer and Mark Harrison line up their homemade
drones in Berkeley, Calif.

Enlarge Larry Abramson/NPR

Hi-tech hobbyists Andreas Oesterer and Mark Harrison line up their homemade
drones in Berkeley, Calif.

But as Oesterer flies his plane around the park, it becomes obvious how much
power is available for a couple thousand dollars.

Using a control box, he puts the plane on autopilot, and it begins to follow
a lazy, predetermined path around the park. It's smart enough to stay
airborne on its own, and it's outfitted with a camera that provides a wide
view of this bayside park.

Oesterer then dons homemade video goggles. In order to block out glare from
the sun, he's wrapped some gray foam around them, so he looks like some sort
of welder from the future.

Instantly, it's as if he's in the pilot's seat, 100 or so feet up in the air,
looking down on us. As the small plane passes above, Oesterer can see the
tops of our heads through the goggles.

Manned And Unmanned Vehicles Converging

Hobbyists like Oesterer are excited about the technology, as are the big
companies that have been working on it for years. John Langford, chief
executive of Aurora Flight Sciences, which makes components for military
UAVs, has been designing drones for scientists for decades.

"I think the distinction between a manned and an unmanned airplane is
arbitrary and vanishing, honestly," Langford says.

But right now, the FAA treats manned and unmanned vehicles completely
differently. If you want to fly a manned plane, you just have to file a
flight plan. For unmanned vehicles, you have to get special authorization
from the FAA, and commercial use is still not allowed.

But new legislation says the FAA must reduce that divide over the next few
years. Langford says these vehicles will soon be part of our lives.

"The civilian market will emerge," he says. "It will happen."

A Tool For Police

But why are drones needed at home in the U.S.? For years, scientists have
found them useful b for doing air sampling, for example. But now, police
departments in big cities like Miami to not-so-big places like Mesa County,
in rural western Colorado see these vehicles as the next cool tool, from
Deputy Amanda Hill of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office in western Colorado
prepares to use a Draganflyer X6 drone equipped with a video camera to help
search for a suspect in a knife attack in this undated photo.  Enlarge Mesa
County Sheriff's Dept./AP

Deputy Amanda Hill of the Mesa County Sheriff's Office in western Colorado
prepares to use a Draganflyer X6 drone equipped with a video camera to help
search for a suspect in a knife attack in this undated photo.

Ben Miller has an unusual job title in Mesa, which includes the city of Grand
Junction: He's the "unmanned aircraft program officer" for the Mesa County
Sheriff's Office.

The agency has two small camera-equipped drones. They came in handy recently
for a fairly basic function: gathering evidence after extensive vandalism at
a public school.

"We went out and were able to fly over the damaged area, and took a series of
still images," Miller says. The pictures have been useful in prosecuting the
crime.

Search-and-rescue teams also see great potential in drones. Miller says one
of his department's drones recently helped wayward hikers. They were lost,
but it wasn't a life-or-death situation.

"We probably wouldn't have been able to justify the expenses to put in manned
aviation [such as a helicopter]," Miller says. "But now that we're flying for
$25 an hour, it's kind of a no-brainer for us."

A Threat To Privacy?

But for others, the specter of unmanned aerial systems patrolling the
homeland has sparked a call to arms.

Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer recently called for a ban on drones
in the U.S. Speaking on Fox News, Krauthammer said, "And I would predict b
I'm not encouraging, but I'm predicting b the first guy who uses a Second
Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that's been hovering over his house is
going to be a folk hero in this country."

The suggestion that drones need to be shot down alarmed the UAV industry.
Drone enthusiast Andreas Oesterer wears homemade video goggles, wrapped in
gray foam to block out the glare of the sun, as he flies a drone over Cesar
Chavez Park.  Enlarge Larry Abramson/NPR

Drone enthusiast Andreas Oesterer wears homemade video goggles, wrapped in
gray foam to block out the glare of the sun, as he flies a drone over Cesar
Chavez Park.

After years of selling its wares to the military, these companies are
desperately trying to depict the next generation of domestic drones as
friendly, more like "Robby the Robot" than HAL, the computer antagonist of
Arthur C. Clarke's Space Odyssey novels and the films based on them.

But you can't blame people for getting the wrong idea if online ads pitching
drones to law enforcement are anything to go by.

One comes from Aerovironment, a California-based company preparing to sell
smaller drones to police. In the video, cops pull the small unmanned plane
out of their cruiser's trunk, quickly assemble it and use it to monitor the
movements of an armed suspect.

While a driving guitar serves as soundtrack, the police use the UAV's camera
to see that the bad guy is setting up an ambush. Thanks to aerial
surveillance, the cops outmaneuver the villain, cuff him and take him away.

While police are eager to keep an eye on criminals, civil liberties groups
warn that these devices are tailor-made to spy on ordinary citizens.

Jennifer Lynch with the Electronic Frontier Foundation says many police
departments plan to use drones to photograph public gatherings, just as they
do with helicopters.

"With the advent of facial recognition and the ability to store images for a
long period of time, it becomes really worrisome when you have a drone
hovering over that sort of situation," she says. "And it's not clear what
sort of legal restrictions would prevent that activity."

Lynch and others say that now is the time to pass legislation to limit drone
use by police, before it becomes commonplace.

But fans of unmanned aviation caution that more restrictions could stifle
innovation. Right now, there are thousands of small companies in this field.
And hobbyists like Harrison in California, whose day job is at Pixar, see the
drone era as the next frontier, as a marketplace that could power the next
economic boom.

"I personally think that it's going to be a lot like the PC industry in the
1970s," he predicts. "There were just dozens or hundreds of little itty-bitty
companies trying to fill the various niches."





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