PERSONAL TECH

Working Drones 

Stuart Goldenberg 
STATE OF THE ART
When a small drone slipped free from its operator one morning last week and flew into the Washington sky, evading radar and the best defenses of the United States Secret Service to end up a sorry wreck on the White House lawn, the incident seemed to crystallize the fear that many harbor about a future dominated by aerial machines.
But let’s not ground these mechanical birds just yet.
Rather than highlighting the actual dangers of drone flight, the White House crash-landing is a better illustration of the hodgepodge, almost backward set of rules governing the drone industry in the United States.
Commercial operators — people who are making money from their flights and therefore have an incentive to improve their training and the technology on their drones — are now barred from flying in most circumstances. And the Federal Aviation Administration is expected to release new draft rules in the next month that will allow for commercial drone operation in only a limited way. The rules are likely to prohibit drones from flying above 400 feet and require that they be used within sight of the operator.
A photo supplied by the Secret Service showing the drone that crashed on the White House lawn on Jan. 26. U.S. Secret Service 
Untrained hobbyists like the one who crashed the drone in Washington, however, are allowed to fly their devices with relative freedom.
For years, the drone industry has been calling on the Federal Aviation Administration to loosen rules on commercial unmanned flight. The White House crash is another in a string of public relations disasters that may hamper that effort. Drones have an image problem. In the popular imagination, unmanned flying robots portend an overhead invasion of privacy, a potential for novel and terrifying aerial attack and a dangerous cluttering of our skies.
“Right now when you see a news story about an unmanned vehicle, it’s either a story about a hobbyist who did something crazy with his small toy, or you hear about a military strike in the Middle East,” said Jesse Kallman, the head of business development and regulatory affairs at Airware, a start-up that produces a kind of operating system for drones.
But Mr. Kallman, like many in the industry, says that the perceptions have been shaped by a lack of obvious applications for drones, a lack that he blames in part on overly restrictive regulations. If the rules are loosened and commercial operations take flight, drone makers argue that perceptions will shift.
That’s because enthusiasts see almost limitless potential for flying robots. When they fantasize about our drone-addled future, they picture not a single gadget, but a platform — a new class of general-purpose computer, as important as the PC or the smartphone, that may be put to use in a wide variety of ways. They talk about applications in construction, firefighting, monitoring and repairing infrastructure, agriculture, search and response, Internet and communications services, logistics and delivery, filmmaking and wildlife preservation, among other uses.
But perhaps the most interesting applications for drones are the ones we can’t predict. Imposing broad limitations on drone use now would be squashing a promising new area of innovation just as it’s getting started, and before we’ve seen many of the potential uses.
PLAY VIDEO|1:43

Drones Misbehaving

Drones Misbehaving

Drones are now soaring beyond their practical and recreational uses and are landing firmly in the hands of troublemakers and pranksters.
 Video by Ashley Maas on November 26, 2014. Photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters.
“In the 1980s, the Internet was good for some specific military applications, but some of the most important things haven’t really come about until the last decade,” said Michael Perry, a spokesman for DJI, a Hong Kong-based drone maker whose Phantom drone was involved in the White House crash. He added, “Opening the technology to more people allows for the kind of innovation that nobody can predict.”
Federal drone restrictions have a single purpose in mind: safety. The F.A.A., which declined to comment because it was completing a draft proposal on how to regulate drones, has spent several years mulling over the right balance between keeping the skies safe and allowing for growth of a new technology. Regulators abroad have moved more quickly. In Australia, Britain, France and Sweden, drones are allowed for commercial use if they receive permission from the government. The European Commission is working on a set of rules to allow for commercial drone operations across the Continent.
The airspace in the United States, though, is among the busiest in the world, which some say justifies the federal agency’s slow course. At a congressional hearing in December, Capt. Lee Moak, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, warned that loosening restrictions on drones would increase the likelihood of crashes with airliners.
“We recognize the potential benefits to our nation’s economic competitiveness, but we also recognize the potential for a safety risk if we don’t treat them as what they are: airplanes in airspace,” he said.
If the F.A.A.’s draft rules come in as expected, they would cut out a wide range of faraway uses, including agricultural applications like overhead crop monitoring or industry uses like the inspection of oil pipelines or electrical lines from afar.
Mr. Kallman of Airware has called for rules that take into account the specific risk posed by a proposed use of drones.
Secret Service officers search the White House grounds after the drone landed inside the fence. Susan Walsh/Associated Press 
“If you’re going to fly over a remote farm field in the middle of Nebraska, that should be regulated much differently from if you’re going to fly over a football stadium,” he said.
Mr. Kallman is also calling for regulators to take into account the technology on board each drone and to allow more freedom to machines that can detect, and respond to, potentially dangerous situations in their environment.
Such technology would be a significant advance. Although they are marketed as intelligent machines, the dirty secret of the drone business is that most unmanned vehicles are little more than fancy remote-control planes. Many have little autonomous intelligence and can’t detect and avoid obstacles. They’re poor at figuring out where they are and staying put, and they all require a learning curve for novice pilots.
One theory about the White House crash is that the operator, whom a friend said had been drinking, had not properly set the drone’s “home point.” When the machine got confused about its location, it flew away, thinking it belonged somewhere else.
Several companies are working on systems to improve drone intelligence, letting them fly despite their operators’ shortcomings. One start-up, Skydio, uses a set of onboard cameras to map and avoid obstacles in the drone’s environment.
“Within five years, the basic navigational problems that are causing all kinds of crashes today are going to be a thing of the past,” said Adam Bry, Skydio’s chief executive.
Drone makers have called on the F.A.A. to take such software-based intelligence into account in its rules. Such a regulatory push, they say, could encourage greater adoption of safety systems. But it is unlikely that the coming rules will do so.
The stringent restrictions could be damaging. Mr. Kallman warns that innovation in drones could move overseas, which would be a shame.
All novel technologies carry some level of risk. But there is a history, in the United States, of regulators offering new industries relative leeway to find their footing, often successfully. It happened with the early days of the Internet and with technologies like Wi-Fi. It could happen with drones, too, if only we let it.
Email: farhad.manjoo@nytimes.com; Twitter: @fmanjoo