20150328 - drones

Drones: they come in peace

Forget the scare stories about spying or remote assassinations. Drones - the small unmanned aircraft that may soon fill our skies - are here to help

By Edward Helmore

7:00AM GMT 22 Jan 2014

Lying on the shelves of Brig Gen Al Palmer's office, opposite a photograph of the air chief posing in front of a fighter jet, are all the components one would need to build a small drone. Scattered about are motors, circuit boards, propellers and body parts. A few yards behind me, in the corridor, hangs a six-rotor "hexacopter", designed to capture aerial footage so clear it could be used to count the individual tiles on the roof of a house.

But, despite the brigadier general's military background, these are not drones designed to patrol the tribal regions of Pakistan, picking off terrorists with precision missiles. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Palmer is developing "happy" drones - unmanned aircraft of all shapes and sizes that will deliver pizzas, track wildlife, survey crops and search for people lost in the wilderness.

"We don't even like to call them drones," says the retired airman, leaning back in his chair behind a large desk. What Palmer's team, based at the University of North Dakota, are developing, he says, are Unmanned Aircraft Systems (or UAS for short) that are going to benefit - and, potentially, revolutionise - society. By the end of the next decade, according to experts, there could be more than 10,000 unmanned aircraft roving the skies of America, with a number not too far behind that inhabiting UK air space.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's announcement just before Christmas - that his company hoped to start a drone delivery service, ferrying products to customers' doors within half-an-hour of a purchase - was not as outlandish a prediction as some at the time suggested. If tests go to plan and regulatory barriers, and concerns about privacy, can be overcome, drones are set to be the next "big bang" in aviation, ushering in an era thus far only dreamt of by the creators of films like Blade Runner or Metropolis.

"There is huge potential," says Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired magazine who now runs his own drone manufacturer, 3D Robotics. "Farming is going to be the big commercial market over the next decade." But there are dozens of other industries with "infrastructure problems", as Anderson puts it, where drones could prove invaluable.

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10586430/Drones-they-come-in-peace.html