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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

This is uncompelling. Just having layers of airspace like that doesn't really address the main issue, which is that in order to get to any layer you have to transit the layer below. Even giant commercial flights end up below 500 feet all the time of course, well at least twice for every flight.

It also has some real issues in that it's glossing over the challenges of steep terrain and obstacles. Most of our air navigation takes place by reference to MSL altitude (i.e. relative to sea level), but this is exclusively based on AGL (i.e. relative to ground level). Not an insurmountable challenge of course but it seems like they are skipping a lot of important parts. Same impression of the "real time data" plan, which sounds extremely complex in the context of aviation.

The overall impression is that nobody has really thought this through particularly, that this is more of a conversation starter at best.

(Relevant: I have a pilot's license)

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It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.

Drone Delivery - never going to work. Lots of solar power - too expensive. Autonomous cars - too risky

This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff, and here we have a company talking about making cool stuff, and every single comment, without exception, is negative.

Yes, this is a very difficult problem to solve. Yes, there are many things they have not addressed yet. Yes, this needs a lot of work. No, they shouldn't just start doing this and see how many crashes happen. But yes, they need to keep talking, testing, learning and working towards a future where this is possible.

Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?

Of course it's coming, and these guys are starting it. Now.

The same negativity could be said of the Wright brothers when they told people they were going to fly, or Henry Ford when he set out to mass-produce the automobile, or the people that said we'd have a global computer network and a computer in every home.

I honestly don't understand why the community here isn't more open to new ideas. Even ideas that never come to fruition are still worth analyzing. There is always something to be learned.

We should be talking about the interesting parts of this challenge and how they could be overcome, not saying "Not safe enough" Every. Single. Time.

</rant>

"Does anyone in their right mind honestly think that in less than 150 years there will still be a single human-controlled vehicle (plane or automobile)?"

You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?

JFK, 1962: We're going to go to the moon.

You: You do realize that we don't even have clean water on a global scale?

Right, but still only twleve of us have been to the moon.

I think the parent commenter's point was that it's pretty naive to think that there will be no more human-driven vehicles at all. Change will happen quickly in some parts of the world, and other parts will take a long, long time to catch up.

Gotta sell all those old manual vehicles to _someone_ ...

Yeah, so we spent a trillion dollars sending a dozen guys to the moon because people in Kansas were shitting themselves thinking about Soviet space superiority. Now tell me about the dozens of assholes who said we'd be terraforming Mars by now, or be flying between Tokyo and LA in 2 hours on hypersonic planes. Heck, tell me about DRAM latency since 1995, the fact that power generation is still dominated by coal plants that are less than 2x more efficient than they were a century ago, or the fact that the sexiest thing in aerospace right now is a company trying to get back to where we were in the 1960's.

If that had been addressed at having every individual visit the moon? It'd be a totally appropriate reaction.

Exactly.

Don't worry. Amazon will deliver water filters via drones. Clean water for everyone!

These are two pretty unrelated issues, and it is a fallacy to compare the two in this context. It's not unlikely that the majority of transit in the western will be automated in the next century or two.

The technology to filter and clean water has existed since the Roman era, but its implementation is highly dependent on political and economic factors (fun fact: western civilization didn't match the Romans' quality of water engineering until the mid-19th century).

The technology for automated cars could well exist in 150 years, and its implementation depends on the cycles of industrial production and consumption. It's likely that much of the western world will have automated transit in 150 years, because everyone will eventually get rid of their 2015 toyota for a model 2077 automated Tesla-google car.

Sadly, there's not as much financial incentive to get clean water to people often without the means to buy it. In places often wrapped up in corruption, war, etc.

With automated transport, the early movers could absolutely dominate the future of transport.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

>This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff

or may be a community of voyeurs who like to watch the Hackers making cool stuff?

> Drone Delivery - never going to work.

And it never ceases to amaze me how the tech community so easily blows off legitimate safety concerns.

You can't just "reboot everything" after a drone wipes out a Cessna or smashes a person's skull. Any drone capable of delivery is going to be big, powerful and not light.

Everybody thinks of drones as "cute little things" when a delivery drone is going to be more like a flying lawnmower like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5FqYiZb_5s

>And it never ceases to amaze me how the tech community so easily blows off legitimate safety concerns.

I seriously doubt any drone proponent will be dismissive of safety concerns. If there are people who don't care about the safety concerns drones bring, this is just the other side of the same coin with people so resistant to the ideas of autonomous vehicles. Both are people not forward looking in their own way.

When Amazon says, "hey we want to use drones," reactions shouldn't be, "hell no there's no way you can make that safe," and instead, "great idea, let's make sure there is a discussion at large to reach a consensus on the safety standards required to make that happen."

Big companies very consistently skimp on things that are not directly related to the success of some undertaking. Sure, safety standards might be put into place, but that does not convince me in the slightest that Amazon is going to spend a lot of money making sure the drones are secure and bug free and can't be hacked easily, so on and so forth... Certainly not to the degree that commercial airplanes are vetted, and even those systems aren't invulnerable.

> This is supposed to be a community of "Hackers" making cool stuff, and here we have a company talking about making cool stuff, and every single comment, without exception, is negative.

Most engineers are conservative and skeptical. If anything, as someone who is an aerospace engineer by education, I'm always surprised by the wild eyed optimism around here.

> The same negativity could be said of the Wright brothers when they told people they were going to fly

It could also have been said of the generations of idiots that jumped off cliffs to their deaths in flying machines that had no hope of working.

In any case, I don't think people are pessimistic about the technology. They're pessimistic about the ability of our social institutions to accommodate and manage the effects of that technology.

Identifying a problem is the first step to solving it. And there's far more likely to be people willing and able to take that first step than any subsequent one.

>It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.

That's because the HN community has a high bar, and most "new ideas" are bullshit (when it's not a rehash of failed old ideas shot down 100,000s of times, like "perpetual motion machines").

> It never ceases to amaze me how negative the HN community is to new ideas, technology and generally "trying new stuff" that has never been attempted before.

Partly I think this is people setting themselves up to be able to say "I told you so!" at a later time. You look less silly predicting a failure that doesn't happen than if you extol the virtues of an idea that later turns out to be complete hogswash under further scrutiny.

Though to put a more positive spin on it: critical thinking is a much neglected skill. Sometimes things genuinely aren't well thought out, and identifying and documenting a problem are the first steps to someone coming up with a solution.

There's an awful lot of stuff below 500' AGL - buildings, power lines, towers, etc. Those are required to be marked and illuminated near airports, but not elsewhere. Near airports, controlled airspace extends right down to the ground surface, and typically five miles out from the airport. That covers big chunks of many cities.

I just looked at the live map for the SF area. A Temporary Flight Restriction over most of SF begins in 39 minutes, surface to 3000 feet, because there is a baseball game at the ballpark.

Autonomous drone operations in urban areas are going to be very tough to control. Drones are going to need their own airborne radar. Maybe only a hundred meters of range, but they're going to need to be able to see details down to power lines. This is available now, but needs more downsizing.[1]

What might work is a system where all manned aircraft have ADS-B (this is coming) and drones also have ADS-B and enough smarts to stay well out of the way of anything bigger. Drones also need short-range radar so they can avoid bumping into obstacles and each other. Think of this as "micro-see-and-be-seen'. It's a lot of electronics to carry, but less electronics than a smartphone.

This is more likely to work than some scheme where everybody phones home to Amazon's cloud.

[1] http://www.autonomoustuff.com/sms-radar-proximity-warning-sy...

First I recognize you said maybe, but the range would need to be much larger than 100 meters.

As out of the box hobbyist drones can already travel at 50 mph [1] (or more I assume). And 100 meters assuming approach of a stationary object would provide just over 4 seconds for the drone to respond and avoid the object.

While 4 seconds is sufficient time, it will lead to drones flying very close to objects before avoiding them which will not inspire public confidence. Also as faster drones appear that window will become even smaller. They should probably have radar with a range measured in nautical miles to avoid having to implement a new system almost immediately. I would say at least 5 nautical miles, although I feel even that would be on the short sighted end of implementation.

[1]http://www.dji.com/product/inspire-1

They've been clocked at 80+. Remember though, they're not going to be descending at 80mph, which is really the only time you'd need to worry about collisions.

That is definitely not the only time you need to worry about collisions, it is the most dangerous time but not the only time, as there are many things taller than 200 ft, as well as birds and unequipped vehicles using the airspace in an unauthorized manner for you to worry about.

Radar power needed increases as the fourth power of the range.

The state of the art in radar is that sensing power lines and similar wires is not reliable. 77GHz radars employed in cars can sense people and bicycles, but that's not good enough. There's been much effort put into power line detection for aircraft (helicopters hit power lines about 50 times a year in the US) but no good solution yet. Drones zipping around streets with overhead wires and trees is not yet workable.

It seems like power lines would be able to be detected with system measuring changes in magnetic fields, perhaps based off current induction sensors. However clearly a system like that does not yet exist and that would not help with other obstacles. And I agree with your statement that this is currently not workable.

The no flight under 500 ft over anything other than sparsely populated areas is in AGL, not MSL. I assume they would also need to stay out of class D/C/B areas. My main concern is that this doesn't take care of helicopter traffic that doesn't have this 500ft AGL rule.

Having ADS/B or a variant of it for the drones would take care of that issue, as in 2020 every aircraft will require ADS/B.

ADS-B also solves the tracking issue for Amazon, as each drone wouldn't need to use a separate communications channel to notify its controller of where its is; Amazon could simply tap into existing ADS-B data streams.

The positional accuracy of ADS-B as currently implemented is often measured in hundreds of meters, and GPS has never been particularly good at accurate estimations of altitude. Are drones to have ground based radar ranging? Altimeters based on barometric pressure? Updated to current altimeter settings via what means?

Anyone touting ADS-B as a realistic solution for avoiding mid-air drone collisions in congested areas is severely naive in my opinion, at least based on current technology. My assumption is that those advocating for it in this context aren't actually familiar with its specs and how it works.

In aviation, separation between flying objects is usually measured in miles horizontally, and a thousand feet or more vertically, and the systems are based on that reality for the most part.

> The positional accuracy of ADS-B as currently implemented is often measured in hundreds of meters, and GPS has never been particularly good at accurate estimations of altitude. Are drones to have ground based radar ranging? Altimeters based on barometric pressure? Updated to current altimeter settings via what means?

Some consumer drones use a radar altimeter to determine altitude AGL. The hardware is inexpensive. GPS is accurate for altitude in the US using WAAS (extremely small cost to use WAAS over traditional GPS).

> Anyone touting ADS-B as a realistic solution for avoiding mid-air drone collisions in congested areas is severely naive in my opinion, at least based on current technology. My assumption is that those advocating for it in this context aren't actually familiar with its specs and how it works.

Disagree. ADS-B was designed specifically for this circumstance (traffic avoidance).

Disclaimer: I have electrical engineering experience, a private pilot license with an IFR endorsement, and have worked on projects using ADS-B in production environments.

ADS-B just doesn't seem like a sensible solution. The only traffic you'll have is VFR, and they don't even require ADS-B out if they don't fly in controlled airspace. It seems that having ADS-B out would just clutter up the system and not be terribly useful.

I think the only viable solution would be to have sensors on the drones themselves -- visual and perhaps low-power radar. That way they should be able to avoid other drones and helicopters. It might be necessary to limit operations to VMC, although that shouldn't be much of an issue at below 500ft (you're only really going to be shut down during fog).

Without ADS-B on the drones, other aircraft won't be able to detect them. It'd be a non-starter.

The only traffic will likely be helicopters, and they don't tend to fly very fast under 500AGL.

Most gps enabled autopilots have barometers for altitude (or fused with gps alt)

ADS-B being a broadcast would also notify anyone else listening to ADS-B broadcasts allowing for the potential of a golden age of drone piracy. Which would be quite profitable if you could avoid being caught.

ADS-B broadcasts contain a unique ICAO code, 6 hexidecimal characters filled in by the Transponder. The collision avoidance logic is handled by the TCAS unit on aircraft.

While new collision avoidance logic is being developed for unmanned vehicles in order to allow them to legally fly in airspace once the FAA restrictions are changed from see and avoid to sense and avoid, when it is released implementing it on an air frame will not be cheap, or light so will be reserved for larger drones. Think about 100k and 20-30 lbs in equipment for an ACAS-Xu Unit, Transponder, and antenna.

And because ADS-B is an internationally used system, changes like the addition of new messages to provide any other information commercial entities wanted their drone to provide would be unlikely to happen quickly if at all, as they would have to go through committee review.

Not nearly every aircraft will have ADS-B in 2020, as it's only required in some airspace.

Many will equip, but nowhere near all, and nowhere near enough to design a system that relies on every bogey having ADS-B out to avoid mid-air collisions.

http://www.faa.gov/nextgen/programs/adsb/faq/#8

My personal idea for this to happen is that every drone should behave as a giant beach ball, physically. The drone would be in the hypothetical center of the ball, and it can move around freely as long as "its ball" does not hit other balls. When it does encounter other balls, the drone performs a physics simulation of a beach ball, making sure that the center of the beach ball will never hit the center of another ball by taking into account "compression" forces, etc.

this already exist... one of many examples (and probably not the best one but I can't find the one that I have in mind): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uXoGDQGRdo

> conversation starter at best.

I agree. We need to be critical of this idea because, as one of my design professors taught us, designers often "win" because they are the first ones to get their ideas out there and thus control the conversation.

I personally don't want anything dangerous or loud flying within a quarter mile of me. It's a cool hobby to do in a field, but those things in suburban or city environments could be looking into windows to see who's home, aiming bullets at kindergarten teachers or piling up C4 on a mall rooftop with next to no accountability or policing. Cars and people can do all the bad things I'm talking about, but there are license plates and cops. Looking at the frequency of attacks where non-traditional policing is the only option (e.g. online) tells us drone crime will be rampant, perpetrated by a spectrum of interests from foreign governments to financial crime syndicates, abusers and corrupt and paranoid politicians. All other dangerous networks like highways, runways and gas pipelines are tightly regulated. Drones belong in that category.

It's incredibly depressing that insane scenarios like drones piling C4 explosives on mall rooftops has become a major concern to the point where people will reject an entire category of technological devices that can otherwise massively improve (and even save) lives if used at scale.

I guess all the media and government fearmongering since 9/11 has been successful. When someone pitches a piece of tech, people now immediately think of how that tech can be used by Bad People to do Bad Things.

I would expect Hacker News of all places to not succumb to this type of irrational paranoia. But I guess we are all human in the end.

wow, you are either incredibly paranoid or just a champion at spreading FUD.

C4 on the mall is not the real issue (although it's always interesting to see how technological changes change the face of criminal behavior.)

The real issue is that I don't want a drone highway over my house. If I don't want planes flying over my house, all night and day, I don't live by an airport. If I don't want traffic noise, I don't live by a highway. But if Amazon decides that 300 feet above my house is the best route for deliveries or some other logistical exercise, I have far less recourse than I would for a road or an airport.

I think if they're only flying at 300ft, this is within the Supreme Court established zone above property in which things like drones would be considering trepassing. In some states like hopefully my own, this may also be grounds to shoot the drone down.

If a human trespassed on your property, would your first response be to shoot him?

Shooting anything out of the sky, at any height, is technically a felony.

Shooting any aircraft out of the sky, at any height, is technically a felony.

Dude, stop giving the drones ideas.

Piling C4 on a mall rooftop is already illegal. There is no need to make it "even more illegal" by regulating drones, and there is no hope that such a regulation can successfully deter such use, short of completely banning drones.

Cars are regulated, guns are regulated, slingshots are regulated, motorcycles are regulated, noise is regulated, EMR is regulated, medicine is regulated, knives are regulated, RC airplanes are regulated. Anything that can cause danger is regulated. Leaving drones unregulated is absurd.

There is tremendous likelihood that regulating drones will lead to less crime. Banning drones within 1/4 mile of permanent residences and mall rooftops will prevent a large chunk of drone crime.

Banning drones from mall areas is not about "making it more illegal to put C4 there." It's about empowering the law and private citizens to forcibly remove drones from a dangerous areas to prevent drone crime.

If drones are allowed to buzz around malls, there are no police to determine if one of them is piling up C4 on the roof. If drones are not allowed to buzz around malls, as soon as one as spotted in a no-fly zone, it can be taken out to prevent a dangerous crime.

If you enforce the regulation with automated anti-drone guns, then yes it will make a difference. I don't think it'll happen though, as such countermeasures haven't been developed for existing security threats.

> Even giant commercial flights end up below 500 feet all the time of course, well at least twice for every flight.

That much is covered in the diagram in the article: anything near an airport is designated no-fly for the drones.

I'm sure there are more elegant ways to address this, but couldn't regulators just stick a drone no-fly zone where piloted aircraft could be expected to be below 500 feet?

There are 12 buildings in seattle taller than 500 Feet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_S...

Food for thought

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