In October, the FAA made great strides in making increasingly smart drones fly themselves, and had Skydio’s self-flying drones inspect any bridge in North Carolina for four years, as long as humans first confirmed that the bridges were clear.
The U.S. airspace regulator is taking an even bigger step: according to American Robotics, it is the first company to be allowed to operate drones without requiring a human pilot or observer near the aircraft.
It is not rather such a large deal as you would expect from the company’s press release or The Wall Street Journal“FAA approves first fully automated commercial drone flights”, because people still have to be part of the comparison: FAA documents show that American Robotics still has to assign a person to each flight, which is followed by a safety checklist before takeoff and inspect the aircraft with remote tools. They are not yet fully automatic.
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 contains an acoustic tracking system with which the drone can feel and avoid other aircraft, which according to the company can spot one more than two kilometers away and can automatically enforce the drone.
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The FAA also approves this waiver 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’ll fly over people unexpectedly either.
As you can see in the company’s video for the Scout system, this technology targets companies that want air controls on their own property – not exactly drone deliveries. For that, the FAA has a separate type of certification. But the FAA does seem interested in what it can teach to make American robotics fly without humans being physically in the area, as stated in the justification for the waiver:
The proposed operations of American Robotics will provide the FAA with critical data to be used in evaluating BVLOS operations from outside locations. Once adopted on a wider scale, it can give a lot of efficiency to many industries that promote our economy, such as agriculture, transportation, mining, technology and non-sustainable manufacturing.
American Robotics previously had a BVLOS waiver from the FAA, but the one (PDF) required some of its pilots to be physically in place for pre-flight inspections.