Drone Delivers to Doorstep: What Next?

Last Friday, Mar. 25, the Nevada startup Flirtey announced that it had made the first successful package delivery to a residential area in the U. S. with an autonomous drone (not steered by a person on the ground).  The demonstration flight, which was completed Mar. 10, carried a package of emergency supplies half a mile through the air to the porch of a vacant house outside Reno, Nevada.  Although large corporations such as Amazon and Wal-Mart have been toying with the idea of drone deliveries, Flirtey attributed its first to experience it has gained with similar tests in Australia and New Zealand.  It turns out that several other countries are more welcoming to commercial drones than the U. S., where strict FAA rules are still in place that are limiting commercial drone operations involving deliveries to test flights such as this one.

What does this achievement mean for a number of groups that may be affected by it:  consumers, companies in the delivery business, and people who earn a living delivering packages?

First, the consumer.  Whenever I thought of drone delivery in the past, I couldn't help but imagine how things could go wrong:  inadvertent haircuts from the propeller blades, for example.  Flirtey plans to avoid this sort of thing by keeping the drone itself at an altitude of around 40 feet (12 meters) while the package itself is lowered to the ground on a retractable cord leading to some sort of grappling hook that releases when the package hits the ground.  So unless you're asleep on the porch and the drone happens to land your box of live Maine lobsters on your head, chances are small that the drone will run afoul of living creatures on the ground.  Birds are another matter, of course, but I'm sure the Flirtey engineers have ways of dealing with them too. 

Although an engineer was killed in an accident involving a large experimental drone in 2013, no injuries or fatalities have so far resulted from a civilian drone colliding with a standard aircraft.  The FAA would like to keep it that way, and news reports of the Flirtey flight also mention that NASA is working on air-traffic-control software for drones.  It's possible that the authorities will work out something like the present direction-altitude rules for large-scale aircraft, but on a smaller scale.  Commercial pilots follow the "odd north east" rule:  if your plane's heading is anywhere from north to east to south, your altitude must be an odd number of thousand feet plus 500 feet, and if your bearing is westerly, you have to be at an even number of thousand plus 500.  So it would be easy to make a similar rule for tens of feet instead of thousands for drones.  It wouldn't solve every potential collision problem, but it would help.

Large organizations whose business includes deliveries of small packages are eagerly awaiting the day when they can take advantage of drones.  While computerized scheduling and routing has improved the efficiency of manned delivery operations, the actual physical delivery process of packages to homes hasn't changed much since the invention of the automobile.  Currently, the FAA rules require that delivery drones always be within sight of the operator.  That's going to involve an operator for a while yet, but you can picture one delivery guy getting a lot more done with the help of two or three drones in a densely populated neighborhood.  Of course, a package on a string can't go into an apartment complex and take the elevator to the 14th floor, but you've got to start somewhere.  So the initial operations will probably be a hybrid thing, with the delivery driver going to a central location, loading drones, and sending them to do the last run of a few hundred feet to individual houses.

Inevitably, that will lead to layoffs among delivery personnel, although with the seasonal nature of the delivery business, at first it might just mean that UPS and similar services won't hire as many temps during the Christmas rush as they used to—they'll just add more drones.  But if the rules eventually allow more nearly autonomous operation of drones, the unattended parts of the flights will be longer, and fewer live drivers will be needed.  And one more type of job that is currently open to someone with only a high-school education will become history.

This is not unalloyed bad news.  The nation survived the demise of the milkman in most parts of the country, and before that the iceman.  But as the current election cycle is demonstrating, for some time now the U. S. economy has been doing a fairly poor job of employing people with less than a college education, and there are lots of people out there who feel that they have gotten the short end of the economic stick.  And a good many college-educated workers with degrees in non-professional areas are underemployed, doing jobs for which they are overqualified.  This is not the place to go into this complex and many-faceted problem, but we simply note that technology is often a destabilizing force.  If you are stably under the thumb of a dictatorship, destabilizing can be good.  But just making things less stable by itself is not always helpful. 

It doesn't look like we will be getting packages from Federal Express floating down from the sky any time soon.  For whatever reason, the FAA has decided to make haste slowly on commercial drones, while other countries speed ahead.  That may give time for the job market to readjust more gradually to the future realities of the delivery business, however it is affected by the advent of drones.  The fact that the first package delivered was emergency supplies reminds us that there are disaster scenarios for which delivery drones will be a Godsend.  And nobody should resent that.

Sources:  Numerous outlets carried the news of Flirtey's accomplishment. I referred to reports on the websites of the Christian Science Monitor at http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/2016/0326/Startup-Flirtey-drone-delivery-is-good-news-for-nacent-industry (by the way, the word meaning budding or fledgling is spelled "nascent," not "nacent"), and Fortune at http://fortune.com/2016/03/25/flirtey-drone-legal-delivery-urban/.  I also referred to the Lapeer Aviation website http://www.lapeeraviation.com/odd-north-east/ for information about the "odd-north-east" rule. 

Will 2015 Be The Year Commercial Drones Take Off?

If you had been in Boulder City, Nevada last December 19, you would have found Governor Brian Sandoval, a U. S. senator, U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) officials, and representatives of a company that manufactures the Magpie, an unmanned aircraft, all gathered to watch the first official test flight at one of six new test facilities the FAA has established to explore how "unmanned aircraft systems" (UASs for short) can safely use the same airspace that is now occupied by manned aircraft.  A video of the test flight shows a man holding what looks like a large model plane.  At a signal, he heaves it into the air.  It flies about twenty feet and nose-dives into the gravel, bending its nose propeller and eliciting a groan from the crowd.

It wasn't exactly an auspicious start to a program that the FAA has undertaken to fast-track new regulations that will accommodate the increasing pressure on the agency to allow legal commercial use of UASs, commonly called drones, far beyond what present regulations permit.  But at least nobody was hurt, except maybe in the pride department.  As I noted in this space over a year ago, experimental drones can be deadly—a large one went amok in South Korea in 2013 and killed an engineer. 

What we are seeing in commercial drone development is a pattern that has played out repeatedly in one form or another whenever a potentially profitable technology outpaces the ability of a regulatory agency to adapt to it.  True to its generally good reputation among government agencies, the FAA is trying to catch up to the rapid advances in commercial drone technology.  But if history is any guide, we are in for some stirring times first.

Something similar happened when advances in radio technology during World War I led to the explosion of radio broadcasting stations in the early 1920s.  The creaky regulatory mechanism of the time stated that the Department of Commerce, which was charged with the task of regulating the new medium, could not deny licenses to any qualified applicant.  As a result, the airwaves got so crowded that in some locations radios were practically unusable.  Congress eventually acted, first by establishing the Federal Radio Commission in 1927, and then following it with the Federal Communications Commission in 1934, under whose ministrations we still operate today. 

Fortunately, the FAA is already up and running, so the situation is not as wild-westish as it could be.  The main issue facing the agency is not lack of regulatory authority—it has plenty of that—but the question of how to allow drones into the air in a way that both allows innovative commercial uses and preserves the exemplary safety record of U. S. air flights that has been achieved in recent years.  The experimental test sites the FAA has set up (besides Nevada, there are locations in Alaska, New York, North Dakota, Texas, and Virginia) can play a critical role in both uncovering unknown potential problems and in finding practical solutions to them.

Just as radio benefited from wartime technology advances, commercial drones benefit from the longer history and huge development effort that has gone into military drones.  In addition, advances in high-density batteries, software, and navigational aids such as GPS systems make it technically possible for drones to travel long distances autonomously.  However, the FAA is still uncomfortable with that.

The way things stand now, there are three classifications of drone regulations.  The only one that doesn't require the operator to obtain special permission is the hobby and recreational class, which has applied to operators of model aircraft for decades.  If you are a researcher, drone developer, or someone who has other good reasons to do not-for-pay work with drones, you can apply for a "civil UAS" permit.  Law enforcement agencies and other public organizations can obtain Certificates of Waiver or Authorization to conduct operations relating to their work.  But before the likes of Jeff Bezos can start delivering Amazon orders via drone, the rules—and maybe the technology too—will have to change. 

I'm going to go out on a limb here, but the start of a new year is a good time for making predictions, and if the following pans out, you heard it here first.  Let it be understood at the outset that I think the following would be a bad idea.  But that doesn't mean that somebody won't try it.  In 1982, a guy with more bravado than sense named Larry Walters tied a few dozen helium balloons to a lawn chair and floated over Long Beach until his balloons got tangled in a power line and he made it safely back to the ground.  I don't know what the payload capability of current small quadcopter-like drones is, but at some point, somebody will have the idea of ganging a bunch of them together to lift the weight of a small person.  This would be more of a stunt than a practical way of transporting people, but if the machines get cheap and powerful enough, it will happen. 

Of course, the FAA would disapprove of such a thing, and rightly so.  But if we do start seeing small packages being delivered by drones, it will happen only if the FAA and industrial interests figure out how to have all that air traffic moving safely and keeping out of the way of buildings, power lines, and giraffes, for that matter.  And if that infrastructure problem is solved, and battery technology advances to the point that you could safely build a helicopter-like backpack that was totally under software control, maybe we could see the day when people could literally fly to work.  Unless it rains, of course.

Sources:  The FAA's overall UAS website is https://www.faa.gov/uas/, and their site stating the rules for hobby and recreational model-airplane flying is http://www.faa.gov/uas/publications/model_aircraft_operators/.  I referred to a report on the Nevada test flight of Magpie carried by Gizmodo at http://gizmodo.com/first-drone-launches-at-faa-test-site-in-nevada-crashe-1673586255.  The six FAA UAS test locations are given at http://gizmodo.com/federal-drone-testing-is-coming-to-these-6-scenic-locat-1491708151.  Business Insider was the source of the commercial drone market estimate at http://www.businessinsider.com/the-market-for-commercial-drones-2014-2.  My blog "Drones, Air Safety, and the FAA" appeared on Nov. 4, 2013.

Drones, Air Safety, and the FAA

On May 10, 2012, in the South Korean city of Incheon, an engineer from the Austrian company Schiebel was demonstrating to South Korean military personnel his firm's S-100 camcopter, a 150-kilogram remotely piloted drone aircraft that could assist South Korean patrol operations at the country's border with North Korea.  In the midst of the camcopter's flight, it suddenly veered out of control and crashed into the control van where the engineer was sitting, setting the van on fire.  Two Koreans were injured and the Austrian engineer was killed.  Speculation immediately arose that the loss of control stemmed from intentional jamming of GPS (Global Positioning System) frequencies by North Korea, which has caused numerous navigational problems in the area in the past. 

Drones, a term that includes helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and anything else that flies without a human on board, have played a major role in warfare for at least a decade.  But prices are falling and capabilities are rising to the extent that commercial and private interests are now wanting to use drones for a wide variety of applications, ranging from surveillance in domestic law enforcement to cargo transport.  Federal Express has even expressed an interest in using pilotless aircraft instead of manned cargo planes, for example.  But in an article in the November issue of Scientific American, two "drone-spoofers" from the University of Texas at Austin raise serious questions about the safety and legal aspects of using drones these ways.

Around the same time that the S-100 crashed in South Korea, UT researchers Kyle Wesson and Todd Humphreys took command of an $80,000 drone at the White Sands Missile Range as part of a demonstration to show how easy it is to distract such aircraft by sending out false GPS signals.  Because GPS signals are so feeble in most locations, it takes relatively little radio-frequency power to overwhelm the real signals from satellites with cleverly devised fake ones.  Once you have taken over the GPS receiver of a drone that relies on GPS for navigation (as many semi-autonomous drones do), you can lead it like a dog on a leash.  Wesson and Humphreys carried their spoof just far enough to show that they did indeed control the craft, and then a backup manual operator took control and landed it safely. 

This demonstration shows that while drones have gained greatly in technical sophistication and capabilities, including the ability to fly completely without manual control from a human operator, the regulatory environment has not kept pace.  The Federal Aviation Administration is charged with the responsibility of making U. S. airspace safe, first of all, then hospitable to air travel for both humans and cargo.  The outstandingly good safety record of air travel in this country is partly due to the FAA's conservatism with regard to changes in the basic way it does things.  

On a flight I took recently from New Jersey to Texas, the captain put the cockpit's air-traffic control channel on one of the audio channels at every seat, and I spent most of the flight eavesdropping as he checked in with a total of six or eight way-stations of the air along our route.  It was reassuring in a way, but at the same time I was impressed by the fact that such conversations would be completely familiar to a pilot who last flew in 1959.  The FAA follows the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and they change their basic procedures about air-traffic control very slowly, if at all.  A major change from radar-based control to satellite-based control involving GPS is in the works, but the present system will remain in place for nearly a decade into the future.

Wesson and Humphreys worry that in the shift to the new system, drones will be left to fall between two stools.  If the new rules for air traffic control make no provision for drones, the whole field could be crippled by the absent-mindedness or hostility of legislators and regulators.  Already, several states have adopted anti-drone-surveillance laws arising from privacy concerns.  These laws would not directly impact the transportation aspects of drone use, but could severely handicap legitimate surveillance with drones.  If the FAA requires that licensed unmanned aircraft always be within visual sight of the operator, that would make drones unusable for most of the promising applications their developers hope to find.  But on the other hand, if it is really as easy as it seems for someone to take control of a GPS-equipped drone, there has to be some way to prevent that from happening if the public safety is to be protected from large, heavy machines falling out of the sky.

The FAA traces its history back to the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which charged the U. S. Department of Commerce with taking actions to ensure the safety of the then-novel field of air travel.  While Congress's delegation of authority to quasi-autonomous agencies has been abused in recent years, the FAA has by and large been a poster child for how a federal agency should behave, keeping safety uppermost in mind while restraining itself from issuing industry-crippling regulations.  It has accomplished this feat by embodying the best features of conservatism and by basing decisions on sound technical arguments as well as on politics.  It remains to be seen whether the FAA can manage to incorporate drones in its next major upgrade of the way it keeps people and things safe in the skies.

We are entering an era in which artificial intelligence and remote control systems are bidding fair to replace human transportation operators in many fields:  railroads, automobiles, and now aircraft.  It will be interesting to see whether those in charge of the FAA's safety regulations can adapt them to accommodate beneficial uses of remotely-controlled and autonomous vehicles without putting the public at undue risk of accidents.  How the FAA handles drones will be a test case for a number of other similar problems that will arise in the near future.

Sources:  The November 2013 issue of Scientific American carried the article "Hacking Drones" by UT Austin researchers Kyle Wesson and Todd Humphreys on pp. 54-59.  I referred to an article on the fatal South Korean drone accident at http://www.suasnews.com/2012/05/15515/ and a brief summary of the history of air traffic control in USA Today at

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-10-10-atc-history_N.htm, as well as the Wikipedia article on the Federal Aviation Administration. 

Should Robot Soldiers Kill—Or Be Killed?

“. . . a fighting-machine without men as a means of attack and defense.  The continuous development in this direction must ultimately make war a mere contest of machines without men and without loss of life . . .”  You might think this quotation is from the discussion that followed the speech on May 30 by Christof Heyns, the United Nations “special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions,” who came before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to call for a moratorium on the development of lethal autonomous robots (LARs, for short). 

But in fact, they are the words of famed inventor Nikola Tesla, writing in the June 1900 issue of Century magazine.  Besides his better-known inventions of three-phase power, induction motors, and high-voltage Tesla coils, Tesla founded a field he called “telautomatics” which we would refer to today as radio-controlled vehicles.  Visitors to his New York City laboratory in the late 1890s could watch Tesla as he pointed out a model boat on a stand, complete with battery-powered motor and rudder.  With no intervening wires, Tesla could remotely command the boat’s motor to run and turn the rudder, all by means of what later became known as radio waves.  In 1899, he even demonstrated the model to an organization called the Chicago Commercial Club.  As the boat made its way around an artificial lake set up in the auditorium, Tesla steered it at will and even set off exploding cartridges.  Clearly, military operations were in Tesla’s mind, and he tried to interest government agencies in his invention, but to no avail.

Although Tesla’s remote-controlled battleships never got beyond the toy-model stage, his imagination went straight on to the ultimate extreme:  machines that fought entirely without human intervention.  Tesla’s dream (or nightmare, depending on your point of view) became reality with the secret deployment in the 1960s of drones:  unmanned aircraft equipped with sensors, communications links, and missiles that destroy selected ground targets on receipt of a human command.  But the human is typically thousands of miles away and undergoes no personal risk worse than eyestrain from too many hours at a computer terminal.  This is not to ignore the psychological problems that remote-control killing can cause, but simply to point out the highly asymmetrical nature of an engagement between persons on the ground in Afghanistan, say, who have been determined by espionage to be worthy of elimination, and those in the U. S. who carry out the decisions of the President to eliminate them.

UN staff member Heyns is talking not about conventional drones, in which a human being is still involved in the decision to kill, however remotely, but about machines that would “decide” who and when to kill on their own, without the direct involvement of a human in the contemporaneous decision train.  In a way, we have had systems like that for years.  They are called land mines.  They are exceedingly dumb, and what they do should not be dignified by the term “decision,” but when a person deploys a land mine, that person has no idea when it will explode or who it will kill.  That depends instead on a mechanical condition, namely, getting close enough to set off the land mine.  Although the conditions that a lethal autonomous robot would require before killing are no doubt more complicated, the difference between an LAR and a land mine is one of degree more than one of kind. 

Not surprisingly, Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end all use of land mines, has joined Heyns in his call for a ban or moratorium on the development of LARs.  As Josh Dzieza of The Daily Beast points out, the U. S. Department of Defense has itself issued an internal directive that defers the deployment of such weapons for at least until 2022, unless they change their minds.  But as with other types of new deadly weapons that become technically feasible, every nation with the capability to develop them is eyeing everyone else, and stands ready to jump in after the first one does. 

Heyns objects to LARs for several reasons, but chief among them is the fact that there is what he terms a “responsibility vacuum” involved if a wholly autonomous device violates the international laws of war.  If a soldier-controlled drone goes awry and kills seventeen children at a birthday party instead of a gang of terrorists, the soldier can in principle be called to account.  But if a number of LARs are set loose on a battlefield, the situation is not essentially different from one in which land mines are deployed, except that the LARs may be more discriminating and more effective because they can move around and chase people.  There is no one in the chain of causation for an LAR kill who is as clearly identifiable as the person who presses the button releasing a drone’s missile on a specific target.

There is also the hoary old sci-fi scenario of robots that turn on their masters, which can be traced all the way back to the legendary Golem:  an anthropomorphic being made by a rabbi dabbling in magic.  At first the rabbi commands the Golem to do good deeds, but eventually the monster turns on him and kills him, at least in some versions of the legend that date back to the 1300s A. D.  If good engineering practices are used, I would expect all LARs to have some sort of nearly fail-safe “pull-the-plug” command.  But the whole point of LARs is to have them work so fast and well that human intervention isn’t needed.  If something goes wrong, it will probably go wrong so fast that a human monitor couldn’t pull the plug until it was too late, even if the robot was about to attack its creators.

Neither the U. S. nor any European country has wholly endorsed Heyns’ call for a complete moratorium on LAR development.  The U. S., which appears to be the leader in this field, does not appear to be rushing into deploying lethal autonomous weapons any time soon, at least in public.  There are enough war-related things to worry about already without adding the threat of robotic assassinations gone awry. 

Tesla’s speculative hope in 1900 was that remote-controlled warfare would prove so horrible that universal peace would automatically ensue.  Events have falsified this particular prophecy of his, as the world has proved to be entirely too tolerant of horrors that even Tesla could not imagine.  But if we can at least delay adding another item to our worry list by not developing lethal autonomous robots, I think we should hold off as long as we can.

Sources:  The quotation from Tesla’s Century article appears on p. 308 of W. Bernard Carlson’s excellent new biography, Tesla:  Inventor of the Electrical Age (Princeton Univ. Press, 2013).  I referred to the following news articles from Radio Free Europe

at

http://www.rferl.org/content/killer-robots-un-moratorium-call/25003167.html,

a UPI report from the website military.com at

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/05/31/un-expert-calls-for-moratorium-on-military-robots.html,

and John Dzieza’s article in The Daily Beast for May 30 at

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/30/the-pros-and-cons-of-killer-robots.html,

as well as the Wikipedia articles on the Golem and unmanned aerial vehicles.