Drones in Smart Cities - Overcoming Barriers through Air Traffic Control Research

These numbers are dwarfed by annual US drone sales, which exceeded 250,000 aircraft in 2014 and are forecast to reach on million by 2018. NAS controllers like the US FAA or EUROCONTROL are currently structured to work with an industry that sells aircraft by the hundreds each year, not by the hundreds of thousands. Are the FAAs of the world hurtling towards a change of scale?

We perform a quick thought experiment to assess the new scale. If US aircraft sales were 100,000 units per year, the US NAS would increase by one whole order of magnitude (Note: 2014 sales already surpass this value). If annual drone sales reach one million new aircraft per year, the NAS will increase to the order of 10 million operating aircraft - growth by two orders of magnitude. Systems engineers know that a change in scale by an order of magnitude changes complexity, creating pressure for new systems built on new principles. We write this paper to explore the new kind of air traffic control required for aircraft in the millions, describe new systems we have built, and integrate the current literature. We see the contours of the new problem emerging from two salient features - low altitude flight with low cost air traffic control services.

The drones driving growth are priced as consumer products in the range of $500 to $50,000. They are used as low altitude toys or tools for personal aerial photography. Commercial operations, still small in the US due to FAA restrictions, are projected an economic impact of the tens of billions, led by:

• Agriculture - for crop dusting and field imaging
• Motion Picture and commercial Film cinematography
• Utility and energy companies surveying hundreds of kilometers of power lines or pipelines
• Delivery services such as Amazon Prime Air, UPS, or Google’s Project Wing

These drone uses are also low altitude flights for various reasons. For safety reasons, no package would be dropped to a consumer from above a few meters, nor would a farm spray insecticide from high altitude. The imaging and surveying applications are low altitude because the costs of imaging sensors need to match the costs of the drones to keep the economy of operations, i.e., $500 to $50,000. Cameras, thermal imaging, or radar sensors at these prices have short ranges (_100 m).

In the rest of this paper, low altitude is nominally defined as 150 m and below, following the recent FAA NPRM, which highlights altitudes of 150 m and below as the target range for these drone operations. Airspace at such low altitudes signals a major change of style for Air Traffic Control. FAA FAR 91.119 requires all aircraft to stay above 300 m in congested areas and 150 m elsewhere. Excepting airports, the entire air traffic control infrastructure is designed to work above 150 m where there is nothing but aircraft. The new airspace is where humanity lives its life.

The full research paper you can download from here: Drones in Smart Cities: Overcoming Barriers through Air Traffic Control Research