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 internet requirement).
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, it can decide to shut down and let you bomb down that hill. Which sounds like an insane pitfall.
Or what happens if the board loses its connection to the remote ? I would hope that it brakes progressively but similarly it just does nothing .. so up to you to find a way to stop.
It is such a weird blind spot to have. I don't think a car manufacturer would ship a product with this kind of blind spot, is that a culture thing ? regulation ?
Anyway, fingers crossed that somebody seizes these opportunities.
Why can’t Tesla just give us an option to keep it consistent? I guess adding video games is more important.
My BMW i3 did this really well, FWIW.
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?
That's called an induction brake and it's already widely used in trains and semi trucks. That said, you still need a friction brake at low speeds, since the induction braking force is proportional to velocity.
You know...they could use it to boil water for a built in coffee/green tea maker.
Just a thought...
Maybe it's not worth the cost/complexity anyway, but the idea has merit somewhere in the design space.
You'd have to cool it, as other commenters have pointed out (you're putting a car's worth of kinetic energy into the thing, after all). I'm not suggesting that it's a good idea, just possible.
Exactly. I would also expect a drone to have triple redundundancy of all sensors but they seem to have only one copy of each.
They should be safe, so they don't fall on people etc, but that is a separate issue.
Same for GPS and everything else.
Some things are more or less important, and even insignificant for safe landing. Triple redundant sensors won't save you from programming errors, birds or cables in rotors, batteries bursting into flames which is still more likely to cause a crash than your only camera or microphone failing - probably even a GPS failure, as long as you have a working IMU.
I’m not... no safety is what the free market will deliver in the absence of regulations or liability or both.
Do you really think if a company could prove it provides double the survivability of accidents compared to others, the free market wouldn't reward it?
Your claim simply doesn't match reality.
The part we should be worried about is that it took 9 years for the govt to require it. 50 years from now, we'll be talking about how stupid it was that drones didn't have safety features.
Volvo had them standard, but Volvo has also never been above 1% market share in the US [1]. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
[1] https://knoema.com/infographics/floslle/top-vehicle-manufact...
Regulation and regulation alone provided us with seatbelts and safety glass. Car companies even ran a massive lobbying and advertising campaign to convince America seatbelts weren't necessary with slogans calling drivers in car accidents "the nut behind the wheel" https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/
I don't think that anyone is arguing that. I think the point is that the free market doesn't deliver these kind of safety features w/o the "incentive" of government mandates. Whether that is b/c the market doesn't demand those safety features in the absence of a mandate is another issue.
Safer than who? Model T fords? How many Tesla's are on the road anyway? In which countries? What about Ferrari? Mercedes?
1. Props still spinning waiting to cut people up in event of flyaways or loss of power from one or more props
2. In the event of total loss of power, what is the total kinetic energy that would be imparted on an individual should the falling drone strike them
Parachute systems effectively deal with both. A proper setup will power off the drone, making sure the props aren't spinning, and lower the rate of descent so minimal kinetic energy will be transferred in the event of a collision with a human being.
The new rules firmly codify what requirements must be met to operate over people safely, and parachutes along with prop guards should easily meet them.
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.
How is this any different than an aircraft transponder or IFF device?
The propellers would not be spinning, and the object would be gently gliding down.
The GP dismissal of the danger of the propellors sounded suspiciously like the guy on YT who just got fined $182k by the FAA, who argued that the first offense for hitting someone in the head should be a $20 fine.
Regardless of whether the blades are locked or spinning at lower RPMs, still better than powered drones falling from the sky!
I don't know what, if any, approaches are implemented but one solution is that you can design a safety feature in the motor control to turn off the motor if it detects blockage.
Really the biggest problem is they aren't cheap, costing more than the drone themselves.
You could even fill them with helium.
In the future where drones are popular, if you get a drone with a high def camera flying over your backyard, you want to be able to identify who is flying it.