MOUNTAIN VIEW — The drones that one day will deliver groceries, toiletries or a box of pizza could swarm haphazardly over U.S. cities, occasionally colliding with other drones and careening to the streets below. Or they could form a buzzing symphony as complex and coordinated as a bee colony.
The latter vision — orderly, multitiered highways in the sky — is what Amazon, Google and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have in mind as they collaborate to develop an automated air traffic control system for unmanned aircraft.
A first-of-its-kind summit this week at Moffett Airfield has convened hundreds of drone makers, regulators, engineers and others to debate how that system would work. Amazon was first to unveil a plan Tuesday that includes a high-speed lane for robot delivery drones — including its own Prime Air fleet — flying between 200 and 400 feet above the ground.
“Right now, you have Google, Amazon and a few others” developing large-scale commercial drone operations, said convention organizer Parimal Kopardekar of the NASA Ames Research Center. “But maybe in 10 years, every home will have a drone, and every home will act as an airport.”
Kopardekar, who launched NASA’s drone management experiment two years ago, said society can’t wait for a deadly disaster such as the 1956 commercial airliner collision over the Grand Canyon that forced sweeping changes in U.S. air traffic control.
“We want to make sure we don’t repeat history,” he said. “We need to have a system in place before the volume builds.”
How to balance the conflicting desires of drone hobbyists, corporate tech giants, aviation experts, farmers, law enforcement, insurers and a privacy-minded American public has confounded U.S. regulators, but agencies from the Federal Aviation Administration to the National Transportation Safety Board are increasingly planning for a drone-filled future.
“We have the innovation of the IT community meeting the conservative, safe culture of aviation, and we’re seeing, quite frankly, a lot of friction,” said Andrew Lacher of the MITRE Corp., which has worked with the FAA on computer-powered air traffic control systems since the 1960s.
Many attendees cited recent examples of private drones interfering with California firefighters, airports and TV news helicopters as examples showing the need for better coordination.
“Eventually, there will probably be some kind of major UAS (unmanned aerial system) accident event,” said Bill English, an investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board, which responds to big crashes involving planes and trains.
As an example, he imagined a large, blade-powered drone crash-landing in a youth soccer field.
He added that he hoped he was wrong.
The FAA unveiled rules in February that will govern small commercial drone flights, but some of the restrictions — especially that remote operators must always be able to see the aircraft — are considered by drone advocates as a temporary patch before technology allows the unmanned vehicles to safely fly on their own. Some also want to crack down on the unregulated use of consumer drones. Citing more than two dozen recent near collisions, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-San Francisco, introduced a bill in June that would regulate recreational aircraft.
Drone makers demonstrated their wares in a netted cage Tuesday beside the giant metal skeleton of Hangar One, the old airship hangar that Google plans to refurbish after taking over Moffett Airfield from NASA in April.
Amazon’s futuristic vision to divide low altitudes into separate drone corridors captivated the Moffett Field audience Tuesday when Gur Kimchi, head of the Seattle e-commerce company’s Prime Air division, explained the plan in a keynote speech.
“The airspace is only as safe as everybody in it,” said Kimchi. Radio-controlled hobby drones would be relegated to the lowest elevations, leaving room higher in the sky for more advanced, Internet-connected, self-piloted aircraft such as those that Amazon plans to fly.
Equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology and sensors that allow them to avoid fellow drones and other objects, the drones could deliver their goods or complete other missions without much human intervention. They would stay below a buffer zone to ensure they don’t hit planes and helicopters but could also be programmed to move away if a helicopter arrives.
How different Amazon’s plan is from rival Google’s is unclear. Dave Vos, head of Google’s Project Wing, a research division developing self-driving delivery drones, plans to present his ideas Wednesday.
Both tech giants, along with Verizon and other partners, have been working with NASA for months on developing scenarios for a cloud-based control system that could track drone traffic using cellphone networks, satellites and radar.
One model for agriculture drones in sparsely populated rural areas will be tested next month at one of NASA’s six drone test sites. Other models for suburban and urban areas will be tested in the coming years.
“We want to be very inclusive,” Kopardekar said. “You can’t have one company go ahead. The solution for airspace has to work for everybody.”
Some were skeptical about the level of precision Amazon’s plan will require.
“It’s a pretty tough mission flying over people’s homes,” said Paige Cutland, director of business development at Canada-based Konsberg Galliam, which develops air traffic control computer displays. He said the debate over commercial drone privacy and safety in Canada is much simpler.
“Flying down a pipeline in the middle of Alberta, the safety risk is very small,” he said.
But in the United States, a growing number of interferences and near-disasters involving private drones has led federal and state lawmakers to propose a patchwork of new rules across the country.
“No bureaucracy can ever keep up with technology that’s advancing as fast as this is,” said Brian Wynne, president and CEO of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, the trade group co-hosting the event with NASA. “But there’s a very concerted effort to catch up.”
Contact Matt O’Brien at 408-920-5011. Follow him at Twitter.com/Mattoyeah.
