

Ask HN: What are the major problems in drone technology? - zxcvvcxz

Is it... Height? Speed? Range? Battery life? Lack of autonomy? Size? Reliability? Other?<p>In particular, how are these limitations hurting potential applications?
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bliti
For what application? The word drone is usually used to define a flying
autonomous robot, but it applies to ground, and water based ones too.

[0] For flying types:

\- Regulation. Which is understandable, due to the safety risks of autonomous
flying machines.

\- Energy storage/consumption. Electric drones are the most common now, but
there could be a move towards Petrol based ones once technology catches on
(lighter/more efficient engines).

For land type:

\- Mobility. Right now there is a lot of focus on leg-based and weg-based[0]
designs.

\- Vision. Object recognition is slowly coming along, but the POV of a land
based robot makes it a bit more difficult.

\- Costs.

For water type:

\- Costs.

\- Regulation.

[0]From my experience. [1]Wheel-leg hybrid design.

~~~
BWStearns
regarding energy storage/consumption and the potential movement to fossil
fueled drones:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_disk_engine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_disk_engine)

I can't find the original article I saw this on but it seems like one of those
things where even though the big market is probably smaller hybrid cars, might
have application in commercial drones since it can potantially save a lot of
weight vs more conventional engines.

~~~
bliti
There are radio controlled model airplanes that use a rotary engine[0] (which
is in the same spirit of the Wave disk engine). The problem with this rotary
engine is that it uses an alcohol-based fuel[1]. I could see someone
adventurous enough trying out this mini-rotary in a drone. It would be highly
expensive, and difficult to tune, but ultimately fun.

[0][http://www.osengines.com/engines-
airplane/osmg1401/](http://www.osengines.com/engines-airplane/osmg1401/)
[1][http://rcvehicles.about.com/od/nitro/f/nitrofuel.htm](http://rcvehicles.about.com/od/nitro/f/nitrofuel.htm)

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notwedtm
I have been building drones for a few years now as a hobby.

From a consumer standpoint, the pricing has come down substantially. You can
build a fully autonomous quadcopter for ~$500 these days (minus the
transmitter).

The problems I see are regulation, and battery performance.

Regulations are really up in the air right now. There have been two rulings by
judges that the FAA's current policies do not cover restriction of commercial
usage for drones. The FAA is actively fighting this. I feel that over the next
few years, we'll see some solid rules set down, and more than likely they'll
be extremely strict to start. Statistically speaking, the FAA has an amazing
track record, and letting anyone into the skies has a real chance of marring
that record substantially.

Cell power density is getting better and better, but it still takes a lot of
work to get over an hour flight time on a multirotor. Thus they tend to be
used for on-spot and precision flying shots for video. Fixed wing drones on
the other hand have amazing range (I've seen 70km+ flights), but are less
capable in the precision flying that a multirotor provides.

On this topic, I am a huge fan of what Chris Anderson is doing over at
3DRobotics. Their open-source APM is the flight controller I choose for most
of my projects, and it is extremely configurable.

Hope this helps :)

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schmidtc
I started a UAV company several years ago. The biggest hurdle we faced was
governed regulation. Not only was it nearly impossible to operate the things I
the US, it was also exceedingly difficult to get an export license. I haven't
been paying attention since I left the comply a few years ago, but it sounds
like the regulations are getting better.

On the technical side we faced a few chanllanges. The first was reliability.
Our planes were small <10 lbs, but would enevitly go down and be very
difficult to recover. After the first couple crashes we designed a protective
shell around the expensive bits. Causes of the crashes we always unique, from
a loose connection, to interference.

The next biggest problem was battery life, ours was an electric system and
getting more flight time in the tiny platform was difficult. This of course
limited the range which limited it usefullness.

Otherwise, we solved the autonomy with off-the-shelve components (albeit
military grade). Otherwise most other issues were resolved with software
(flight planning, data recovery, etc).

Our application was aerial imaging, I imagine other applications would have
another set of problems.

~~~
schmidtc
Forgot to mention, price was another difficult problem. We were trying to
build a low cost system for academic use. The single most expensive component
was the flight computer, there were some low cost alternatives, but at the
time they didn't perform we'll enough. Perhaps this has changed.

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thejteam
The DOD has a fair number of SBIR topics each release on various types of
autonomous vehicles, including air, land, and sea based drones. Look at
[http://www.dodsbir.net](http://www.dodsbir.net) and look through the recent
archives, say the last two years, and you will see what the DOD thinks some of
the major challenges are.

------
joshdance
Reliability. You don't want 20 lb blenders falling from the sky.

~~~
informatimago
You don't want them to fall on people, or brittle devices. But otherwise, they
could fall onto a lot of places and things without further consequences.

If you consider a city like Los Angeles, with 3792621 inhabitants, and a
surface of 1215e6 m², assuming each person takes 1 m² (ie. the person-drone
cross section), that gives for fall points equidistributed over the surface a
probability of hitting a person of 3792621/1215e6 = 0.0031; only 0.31% per
fall! To hit a person with 1/2 probability, you'd need a rainfall of 160
drones!

Will your drone fly over crowded areas? Most people are inside houses most of
the time anyways, and there's no reason to fly over the sideways.

Now, you must also consider other areas to avoid landing (or falling) on.
Cars, (streets), random machinery (eg. air conditioners), power lines, etc.
But all in all, that still leaves a lot of places where to crash with no
consequence, if you need to crash.

IMO, there's a lot of unreasonned fears about the subject (as there is about
anything else; and people wonder in other threads, why the belief that humans
use only 10% of their brains persists...).

~~~
joshdance
True. However, current drone usage is to fly over interesting areas. These
areas are interesting because of natural beauty (ocean, lake, mountain etc) or
because of people. Crowds, Times Square, sporting events, etc. For example me
using a drone at Park City filming my friends snowboarding has a much larger
risk of hitting someone that on the empty desolate mountain 1 mile over. But
no one flies drones over on that empty mountain because it is boring. I don't
know what the percentage of hitting someone might be but certainly higher for
current drone usage than flying a drone over a random city with equally spaced
inhabitants. :)

And kudos on your calculations, I had never seen this done before. This is the
type of math that "news" stories need to have.

