In October, the FAA took a big step towards allowing increasingly intelligent drones to fly alone, allowing Skydio’s autonomous drones to inspect any bridge in North Carolina for four years, provided that humans first checked that these bridges were unobstructed.
Now, the U.S. airspace regulator is taking an even bigger step: American Robotics says it has become the first company allowed to operate drones without the need for a human pilot or observer anywhere near the aircraft.
It is not quite as important as you would expect from the company’s press release or Wall Street NewspaperThe title “FAA approves first flights of fully automated commercial drones” because humans still need to be part of the equation: FAA documents show that American Robotics will still need to designate a human for each flight, which will go through a safety checklist before takeoff and inspect the aircraft with remote tools. They are not yet fully automated.
But after that, the company’s drone-in-a-box scout will take over and fly the mission – and automatically stop if necessary. The Scout box includes an acoustic detection system that allows the drone to detect and avoid other aircraft, which can detect one more than three kilometers away and automatically force the drone to descend, according to the company.
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The FAA is also approving this exemption only for a handful of specific locations in Kansas, Massachusetts and Nevada that are owned by the company or its customers, so it’s not like they are flying over unsuspecting people.
As you can see in the company’s video for the Scout system, it is targeting this technology to companies that want airborne inspections with a push button on their own properties – not exactly drone deliveries. For this, the FAA has a separate type of certification. But the FAA seems interested in what it can learn by letting American Robotics fly without humans physically around, as it explains in its justification for the resignation:
The operations proposed by American Robotics will provide the FAA with critical data for use in evaluating BVLOS operations outdoors. Once adopted on a broader scale, such a scheme could provide efficiency to many of the industries that feed our economy, such as agriculture, transportation, mining, technology and non-durable manufacturing.
American Robotics previously had an exemption beyond FAA’s visual line of sight (BVLOS), but that (PDF) required its pilots to be physically in a location for pre-flight inspections.