Game of Drones

Updated 11:19 am, Sunday, September 28, 2014


In the game of drones, Amazon, Facebook and Google all want a piece of the sky.

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, have existed for decades, although mainly associated with military organizations as weapons of war or spying.

But over the past two years, the technologies now commonly found in smartphones — accelerometers, sensors and high-definition cameras — have accelerated development of a new breed of commercial drones used in real estate, agriculture and movies.

“The implications for these technologies are extremely far reaching,” said Arthur Holland Michel, co-director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. The 2-year-old center tracks what has become a daily stream of drone-related news.

And at some point in the near future, Holland Michel believes these flying robots will become a common sight — but only if the government and industry can resolve a host of sticky regulatory, safety and privacy issues.

“We’re still at a point where the drone is considered a new technology,” he said. “In five years, it’s not going to be thought of as a new technology. But as it gets more advanced, the social and legal barriers are getting more robust.”

Robert Harwood, an aerospace and defense industry expert with Ansys, a Pennsylvania simulation software company, said hundreds of companies are at work on drones. And small wonder — one industry trade group estimates the commercial drone market could soar as high as $82.1 billion by 2025.

“People are coming up with all sorts of ideas of how to use commercial drones,” said Harwood, whose company works with drone makers. “We’re just at the crest of that wave.”

Amazon’s push

In December, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed on a national TV news show that his Seattle company was working on a project to create a fleet of drones that can deliver packages weighing 5 pounds or less to customers within 30 minutes.

Critics scoffed at the concept as pie-in-the-sky thinking by Bezos. But drone experts said Amazon’s ambitions were not that outlandish; indeed, United Parcel Service and DHL have launched similar drone projects.

And Bezos said the Amazon Prime Air team is serious about its work, saying they were “already flight testing our fifth- and sixth-generation aerial vehicles, and we are in the design phase on generations seven and eight.”

Then in March, Internet.org, a nonprofit organization backed by Facebook, revealed plans for a fleet of solar-power drones that can beam online service to remote corners of the world and connect the 5 billion people in the world who lack Internet access.

Internet.org envisions a fleet of drones capable of operating at 65,000 feet above Earth for months or years at a time. Facebook augmented the work of its own Connectivity Lab, which includes top aerospace and communications experts, by spending a reported $20 million to buy Ascenta, a British company that created prototypes of the Zephyr, a solar-powered unmanned aircraft.

“Connectivity isn’t an end in itself, but it’s a powerful tool of change,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a paper posted on Internet.org announcing his vision of “connecting the world from the sky.”

And in August, Google revealed Project Wing, a top-secret research effort launched in late 2011. The company passed Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s challenge to use a self-flying vehicle to make delivery to at least one real person — a cattle farmer in rural Australia received packages of chocolate bars, dog treats, cattle vaccine and a first aid kit dropped by fishing line from a hovering drone.

In describing their work, the Project Wing team said drones could change the way we think about consuming products “if you can get something near-instantly.”

 

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Game-of-Drones-5783940.php