The “Holy Grail” of Future Civilian Small Drone Flight

Video  Above: Army Research Lab Advances AI to Land Drones on Tanks

By Kris Osborn – President & Editor-In-Chief, Warrior Maven

Delivering time-sensitive, life-saving supplies from low altitudes during a major humanitarian crisis, helping police track criminals on the run and even quickly dropping-off pizza from just a few miles away in an uneven urban environment … are all things drones will do in the very near future.

Deconflicted Lower Altitude Drones

Much of the technology for these kinds of key civilian tasks, enabled by advanced computer algorithms, automation and radio-frequency transmission, is here today to a certain degree. However, airspace for lower altitude drones must be “deconflicted” to ensure safety and new computer technology needs to enable “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” operation for commercial drones.

Given the pace of the market’s current expansion of smaller unmanned systems increasingly capable of performing a wider range of tasks, and the value-added promise that they bring, the FAA is working intensely with commercial and defense companies like Raytheon Intelligence & Space to reach breakthrough levels of secure, deconflicted beyond visual line-of-sight drone flight.

“Unmanned traffic management capability deals with the future. This is a new megatrend for electrically powered vehicles, whether they’re small drones, that are delivering packages from Amazon or UPS, or large passenger carrying, or cargo carrying aircraft that are electrically powered. 

They’re all going to be flying relatively low level, from the surface to maybe 400 feet for the small package delivery drones. It will likely be surface to five or 10,000 feet for passenger carrying drones,” Kip Spurio, Technical Director of Air Traffic Systems at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, told Warrior in an interview.