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FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

reuters.com

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Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#251

Post by vagrantJin »

enriquec wrote: post #213
kingaillas wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features. I’m not... no safety is what the free market will deliver in the absence of regulations or liability or both.

then why were seatbelts and safety glass delivered by the free market? why are tesla's significantly safer than other manufacturers of their own free will? Why do they push updates that improve braking to customers that have already paid? Why does volvo specifically advertise their safety as a differentiator? Do you really think if a company could prove it provides double the survivability of accidents compared to ot…

> why are tesla's significantly safer than other manufacturers of their own free will?

Safer than who? Model T fords? How many Tesla's are on the road anyway? In which countries? What about Ferrari? Mercedes?

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#252

Post by anticensor »

rkagerer wrote: post #78

Even though I don't fly over people, I retrofitted a parachute onto my DJI drone just in case. It automatically deploys if the drone loses power or control. It doesn't impact flight characteristics or battery life by much. I feel like a basic safety like this would be a prudent and more effective measure for overhead flights than self-transmitting "license plates" (which I agree are at least better than the silly int…

Do you have a tutorial for fitting the parachute? Incorrect method of deployment would do more harm than good.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#253

Post by saagarjha »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #247
bananabreakfast wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that's not how batteries work. Regen works because the batteries are being charged by the induction of the motors taking energy from the moving car. If the batteries are full they cannot take any more change and hence cannot draw power from the motion of the car. What do you expect them to do? Dump the current on a giant resistor and hope it doesn't melt?

Can anyone do the math and tell me how big that resistor would need to be? I’ve always wondered how many watts are being dissipated by my brake pads and rotors when I stop.

Assuming your Tesla is around 2000 kg and traveling at 30 meters/s, it's got about 900,000 J of kinetic energy. Stopping in 10s is some serious power that you'd need to throw off.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#254

Post by saagarjha »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #152
on_and_off wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features. I would pay extra for a drone with such safeguards. just the prospect of less chances of ruining it would be enough. Similarly, eskates often have a regenerative battery charging while braking which is a great idea. but it also cannot handle charging while already full. So if you go down a slope while the board is full,…

Teslas turn off regenerative breaking if you charge too far, but the car tells you that pretty prominently: however, the car handles very differently without Regen brakes.

Annoyingly, newer Leafs don't let you limit how much you charge anymore, and the regenerative braking curve changes based on how much battery you have…

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#255

Post by fulafel »

saagarjha wrote: post #253
JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone do the math and tell me how big that resistor would need to be? I’ve always wondered how many watts are being dissipated by my brake pads and rotors when I stop.

Assuming your Tesla is around 2000 kg and traveling at 30 meters/s, it's got about 900,000 J of kinetic energy. Stopping in 10s is some serious power that you'd need to throw off.

All of yhe 90 kW doesn't need to be radiated in real time though as it's ok for the brake elements to heat up.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#256

Post by cookiengineer »

rkagerer wrote: post #78

Even though I don't fly over people, I retrofitted a parachute onto my DJI drone just in case. It automatically deploys if the drone loses power or control. It doesn't impact flight characteristics or battery life by much. I feel like a basic safety like this would be a prudent and more effective measure for overhead flights than self-transmitting "license plates" (which I agree are at least better than the silly int…

The interesting part behind the current "noflyzones" database concept is that it requires a lot of synchronization overhead.

My DJI dropped out of 100m in the middle of the flight because GPS took so long to synchronize.

And yes, the firmware does not "safely autoland" like any reasonable person would expect. Instead it just shuts off the power and drops down.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#257

Post by labawi »

dheera wrote: post #200
on_and_off wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features. I would pay extra for a drone with such safeguards. just the prospect of less chances of ruining it would be enough. Similarly, eskates often have a regenerative battery charging while braking which is a great idea. but it also cannot handle charging while already full. So if you go down a slope while the board is full,…

> I am always stunned that many (most/all) of these high tech gadgets lack a LOT of safety features. Exactly. I would also expect a drone to have triple redundundancy of all sensors but they seem to have only one copy of each.

As long as they are carrying less people than 737-MAX, I think they will be fine with less redundancy.

They should be safe, so they don't fall on people etc, but that is a separate issue.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#258

Post by pc86 »

vel0city wrote: post #36
skanga wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do automated license plate reader work via night vision systems? Could they be made to work?

Lots of license plates these days have high contrast between the letters and the background. These license plates are often usually covered in retroreflectors such that the high contrast is accentuated with any kind of light. A strong IR light source from an IR camera can probably read most clean license plates driving by without being obvious to the people being viewed. Remember that light follows the inverse square…

Yup - luckily this was for tolling specifically, so traffic was well controlled, cameras were close, there was a flash of bright light as the photo was taken, etc. Most photos you couldn't even tell if it was night or day if you zoomed in close enough to the vehicle. Less reliable photos would definitely have made for a more challenging (but more interesting!) project.

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#259

Post by 7952 »

ineedasername wrote: post #47
powersnail wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand it for some long-distanced batch delivery, by a giant drone. However, swarms of little drones flying in the sky of cities or private properties seems incredibly irritating, however efficiently they improve deliveries.

I think about the truly massive # of packages delivered all over the place and think we'll need some significant routing protocols in place before we can easily get enough drones airborne without crashing into each other. Sort of a tcp/ip for millions of drones.

I don't think communication protocols are a good metaphor because they can be stateless. You can drop packets and it does matter!

A better way to think about it is as a shared data structure. It is a 3d vector space with some attributes that help predict the future. Each drone has a different version of this data structure in memory. The data structure has an initial state at take-off and is updated using radio communication and sensor data.

If the data structure is perfectly synchronised then planning is easy. There is plenty of sky and simple rules can be applied. But it never will be perfectly synchronised. in that sense it is like a globally distributed database.

The data structure may have been edited by another drone and the change not communicated. You may have lost communication and not even realised. Local conditions may have reduced GPS quality giving you false location information.

So perhaps an interesting metaphor is concurrency control. Do we lock airspace or can we have transactions? Can we partition or shard the airspace? When is consistent state required?

Re: FAA issuing new rules to allow drones to fly over people and at night

#260

Post by pinky1417 »

leetcrew wrote: post #201
pinky1417 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drone’s blades would likely still be spinning during a parachute descent... albeit at lower revolutions per minute. I’d imagine drones operate like a helicopter: in the event of an engine failure, the helicopter goes into “autorotation” in which the now unpowered rotor blades move due to the air going through the blades as the helicopter descends, thus braking the fall. However, if drones have locking rotors, the…

this is a reasonable hypothesis, but quadcopters don't work this way. the propellers are usually not large enough to meaningfully slow the descent of the aircraft. also, quads are not stable the way a helicopter with one large rotor is. a drone is likely to tumble when the power is cut.

Fair point. Didn’t mean to imply that the rotors would meaningfully slow descent. Just meant to say that, parachute or not, the rotors could still be moving while unpowered. It’s more of a technicality since the slow rotation of the tiny blades would probably be towards the bottom of the list of safety concerns, parachute or not.
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