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Comment by kozikow | Hacker News Reader

Having spent some time on business applications of drones, especially imagery, I am actually quite bearish on startup application of drones.

Even if there are some locations that accept innovative experimentation with drones (e.g. Switzerland or Japan), the majority of countries (e.g. the USA with part 107) are quite restrictive. Because of severe restriction on autonomy, all large-scale applications are not legal.

Not many people are investing time and money into building new drone applications, as it's uncertain it will be legal in the near future. Without serious $ behind it, drone regulations will probably stay restrictive. If you are thinking about Amazon - I heard from multiple people that last-mile delivery is actually more feasible with ground robots.

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This will start changing as technology improves. Specifically it will change as applications emerge where these things provide a concrete economic benefits that offset the risk. Basically when that happens, money starts flowing to regions where the legislation is more favorable and more innovation happens. At some point there's a tipping point and legislation adapts due to pressure of local parties missing out.

E.g. the agricultural sector in the US has enormous power on this front. They already use lots of drones as well as e.g. helicopters to dry cherry trees, crop dusting planes, etc. That business is quite expensive and an obvious target for replacement by drones. When technology gets to the point where legislation is the only real obstacle, there will be lots of pressure for legislation to change. I'd say that's a question of when not if.

What will need to happen on the safety front is for drones to play nice with regulated airspace and controllers/pilots in the area. Mostly drones currently don't have stuff like ADS-B or transponders on board. Given how cheap and light stuff like that is getting, I think it's a matter of time before there will be some drone specific versions of that that allow controllers to monitor any drone activity in their area. I imagine stuff like that won't be optional for any commercial operations. Mostly drones are a danger only because they stray in the path of other planes. If there's collision warnings, controller advisories, etc. things get a lot safer.

> E.g. the agricultural sector in the US has enormous power on this front. They already use lots of drones as well as e.g. helicopters to dry cherry trees, crop dusting planes, etc.

There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here. As long as there is a restriction of a single drone per pilot, using airplanes and helicopters tends to be cheaper for most use cases.

Only under a closed world assumption. If e.g. Mexican and Canadian farmers start seeing real cost reductions by using drone technology there will be some very real market demand to sort out any legal obstacles for doing the same in the US. Basically this article is about the Swiss being a bit more pragmatic here. It's probably not the only part of the world where this is the case. I imagine the Chinese are very eager to get a head start in this market as well.

So, the only effect of this legislation will be that likely successful companies in this space may not necessarily end up being US based companies and that the US will end up being late to the game. That in itself might be enough incentive for this to get fixed sooner than later.

In the same way, self driving cars are being invested in despite legal obstacles that currently make operating them illegal in most places.

This is similar to the landscape for self-driving cars, but I don’t see how it’s an impediment. Maybe someone can tell me where I’m wrong:

Even if only one country in the world encourages these kinds of autonomy, isn’t that adequate for the development phase of the tech?

If, say, India permits autonomous drones broadly...

1) That market alone can sustain all the research and initial marketing to sustain the industry to where there are mature product offerings.

2) Once there are mature product offerings, then any country that allows them will put their citizens at a competitive advantage.

3) Since permission is more easily granted than revoked, that advantage will spread faster than it contracts.

4) At some point there is a tipping point where money is clearly left on the table in banning countries, and the bans become a clear disadvantage.

5) Autonomy is permitted in all but a few markets.

I honestly don’t even see how that process would even slow growth, let alone halt it.

People act like these technologies are ready-to-roll and regulation is an impediment, but it seems like regulators can move pretty slow and still be fairly close to the growth curve the development and marketing timeline is capable of.

I work at Picterra[1], a swiss company doing machine learning on drone & satellite imagery.

From discussion with a number of drone service providers, it seems to me the restrictiveness really depends on the context.

For things involving flying a drone over a crowded area, it's definitely hard to get authorization and we've seen projects being abandoned because of that. So yeah, drone delivery in cities might take some time before it is allowed.

On the other hand, most of the commercial applications I've seen are around using drones for mapping. So basically taking pictures and then processing them (create orthophotos, build a 3D model, detect objects, etc...). This usually doesn't involve flying over crowd and for a number of use cases (farms, construction site, security) the fly would be over a private property. A lot of people are able to do this without any legal restrictions.

From what I know of the history of the swiss Drone Valley, the two biggest success are sensefly [2] and Pix4D [3] and those are in the mapping business. Two of the booming startups would be wingtra [4] and flyability [5]. Wingtra seems to be mapping-oriented as well and Flyability develop drones that can fly inside. So a lot of the swiss drone valley is really into drones that can take pictures for mapping & inspection and I think this segment will continue to see massive growth in the future.

[1] https://www.picterra.ch/ [2] https://www.sensefly.com/ [3] https://pix4d.com [4] https://wingtra.com/ [5] https://www.flyability.com/

> On the other hand, most of the commercial applications I've seen are around using drones for mapping. So basically taking pictures and then processing them (create orthophotos, build a 3D model, detect objects, etc...).

In my opinion, the majority of those applications are better served by either CCTV or manned aircraft.

Mapping use cases - If the area is big enough, manned aircraft mapping is much cheaper than drone mapping. Typical airplane ortho is around the 10cm/pixel, so it is sufficient for the majority of use cases. E.g. Check our nearmap. If the area is small, the machine learning is not going to make lots of $, as it's better to just use humans.

Monitoring use cases - e.g. "I want to detect if construction workers are wearing helmets" or "I want to detect poachers in the area". You can provide more business value by doing computer vision on CCTV camera.

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