
When Drones Fall From The Sky - ilamont
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/06/20/when-drones-fall-from-the-sky/?hpid=z1
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Jemaclus
Only somewhat related to the article, the broad use of the word "drone" to
include both military drones (usually gutted aircraft, to my understanding)
and civilian drones (usually smaller-scale robotics, like quadcopters) is a
little confusing. I kinda wish there was some better term to differentiate
them, because while I can see a military drone falling from the sky being a
great hazard, a smaller quadcopter falling from the sky isn't going to be that
bad. (Bad enough, I guess, but not to this degree.)

Like, for instance, some town in Colorado recently passed (or attempted to
pass) an anti-drone ordinance giving citizens the right to shoot down drones.
In my mind, this means military drones -- not quadcopters -- but to the
average person in this town, it probably means any automated and/or remote-
controlled aircraft, including quadcopter-drones.

Amazon was recently talking about using drones to deliver stuff. Delivery
quadcopter-drones are way, way, way different from military RC-planes-with-
missiles drones. Due to the common label "drone," however, I'm not sure the
average American really knows the difference.

Anyway, just thinking out loud.

~~~
nathannecro
I have some experience with building large (2-3 foot rotors) quadrocopters.
They are _heavy_. With batteries and motors and no payload, our copter weighed
~10-30 pounds depending on the battery loadout. I wouldn't want a 10 pound
object falling at whatever the copter's terminal velocity is, smacking me on
the head.

~~~
baddox
Luckily, in general the larger a quadcopter is, the more expensive it is, and
thus the less likely it is to be used by an irresponsible person. This
obviously isn't a perfect solution; there could be some rich person willing to
spend big bucks on a quadcopter while having no clue what he or she is doing,
or in the future there could be a $500 off-the-shelf quadcopter with 2 foot
rotors (unlikely for quite a while, but possible). So these things self-
regulate to a certain extent. That's why you hear of far fewer problems with
700 sized RC helicopters than with DJI Phantoms, despite the former being far
more dangerous.

~~~
x0054
DJI Phantoms and the more common clones by Walkera and other manufacturers are
well known for going on "journeys of self discovery." When connection with
remote drops, they are supposed to come back home, but some just tend to fly
away, never to be seen again. One of those dropping on your head from 200 feet
in the air will kill you!

~~~
baddox
I have never seen evidence that fly-aways area used by anything other than
basic misuse, namely, not verifying that there is a GPS signal before flying.
Granted, I think software changes could mitigate this, and I think I remember
hearing that DJI released an update along these lines).

Still, misuse of plenty of things can have a probability of killing someone.
Automobiles are the most obvious example. Bicycles are a great example, since
they can be had for similar prices and similar restrictions (i.e. basically
none) as quadcopters. Even a baseball propelled from a bat can kill someone at
least as easily (and I would argue much more easily) as a DJI Phantom.

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rdtsc
I think with increased use of drones both for attack and surveillance there
would also an increase in anti-drone technology.

Is there any easy way to detect and fight drones? Lasers? Jammers? Iran
presumably jammed the drone they captured. Can that be done with a transmitter
one can build at home?

Drones will be used more and more by law enforcement agencies, and I think
eventually they will come with some (at least at first) non-lethal weapons --
flash grenades, rubber bullets, tazers, spikes for your car tires. Ran the red
light? -- better watch out, a drone will be dropping tire spikes soon in front
of your car.

In that respect I bet counter-drone technology will become interesting. You
know harming a helicopter with real police officers or even harming a K-9
officer is a serious offense. Attempted murder, very threatening. Disabling a
flying camera hovering over your head is not there yet. So there is less
threat of a harsh punishment. Of course laws will catch up and there will
probably be special provisions and penalties for disabling or tampering with
drones that go beyond run of the mill vandalism.

~~~
sean-duffy
Assuming you know the frequency a drone is flying on, it is trivial to jam.
However a lot of the more advanced flight control systems (even on hobbyist
drones) will have a failsafe that causes it to return to home or similar in
the case of loss of radio contact. I suppose even in that situation you could
use a GPS jammer to stop that from happening. Of course this would all be
highly illegal.

~~~
GHFigs
_Assuming you know the frequency a drone is flying on, it is trivial to jam._

Hence they make it hard to know the frequency:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_hopping)

~~~
baddox
Yep, the vast majority of 2.4 GHz hobbyist RC aircraft do this, but you're
still subject to noise floor issues. It might take a heck of a lot of power,
but there's no technical reason why this stuff still can't be jammed, and it's
not that rare to have signal drop-outs caused by (presumably) unintentional
interference.

~~~
XorNot
Powering up a multi-megawatt 2.4 GHz jammer will get you arrested. You are not
allowed to transmit in the 2.4GHz band over a few watts (and even then)
without a license and the rules are very specific for what you can send (in
Australia for example you're not allowed to encrypt that traffic).

And frankly, all the panicky idiots who keep salivating at the prospect of
wrecking things makes me glad the rules for radio transmissions are the way
they are. Heads off a heck of a lot of problems.

~~~
jacquesm
You don't need multiple megawatts. You just need to be louder than the
original transmitter. And that's not all that hard, especially if you can use
a directional antenna pointing in the direction of the drone.

~~~
baddox
For frequency hopping radio links, you would need to be louder than the
original transmitter on every part of the spectrum the radio is jumping to.

~~~
jacquesm
Being 'dirty' is a lot easier than being clean. The bands are typically not
all that wide and to mess them up is easier than to be nice. A sawtooth
modulator with a suitably high frequency modulating a carrier will disrupt a
significant chunk of the spectrum with reasonably little power input. After
all you only need to disrupt _part_ of each packet to disrupt the packet.
Jamming is a lot easier than getting a nicely modulated signal through.

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Shivetya
I find it a bit odd they crashed one because the pilot didn't realize it was
upside down, I would expect there would be some intelligence to the avionics,
like - NO DAVE I WILL NOT DO THAT.

Let alone automating landings, I guess corners have to be cut in places.

Now as for civilian drones, liability laws will quickly sort this out. The
desire to have them will come up against the costs to insure them leading to
better designs and rapid improvements. The military can afford to lose its
toys, private individuals don't usually have that luxury

~~~
zobzu
maybe they just felt like throwing that in there. its actually possible for
pilots of real airplanes to confuse ground/sky during disorientation periods
after taking some Gs regardless of the avionics warnings.

its not really possible for drone pilots unless they're flying drunk.

its kinda easy to throw in random little things in news articles since nothing
is checked. just look at any news item about something you know very well and
you'll be upset how almost everything is wrong - why would news about anything
else be accurate then?

~~~
Terr_
> its not really possible for drone pilots

On the contrary, it sounds much EASIER for drone-pilots to make that mistake,
because no matter how the drone is oriented they (the pilots) perceive
themselves as right-side up.

Unlike direct pilots, you don't even need a heavy G-force situation, you
simply roll 180 degrees.

~~~
zobzu
I flew non-military drones for 10 years and I dont see how thats possible to
lose orientation (unless you lost signal/video/etc.) honestly. If for any
reason you were blind or stupid (I never, ever confused ground/sky on clear
video), the avionics are extremely clear and do not depend on video quality.

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reirob
"A $3.8 million Predator carrying a Hellfire missile cratered near Kandahar in
January 2010 because the pilot did not realize she had been flying the
aircraft upside-down." \- how can this happen? Isn't the picture upside down
on the screen?

~~~
rdtsc
Presumably at a high enough altitude or at night it would be hard to tell.
Looking at that video is pretty low res.

The artificial horizon might not been working correctly as well.

Getting disoriented even on a real aircraft is not that hard. Sometimes even
during constant turning the brain's accelerator resets and can interpret the
turning as level flight.

~~~
derwiki
At a "high enough altitude" it probably wouldn't have crashed ;-)

~~~
rdtsc
But it could have stalled or got into a spin didn't have enough time to
recover.

~~~
smoyer
A good point ... and wings are designed to provide lift while flying right-
side-up. While upside down, you lower the elevators to promote level flight.

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dm2
Is there any kind of cheap and easy crash avoidance system for drones? If so
then it should be mandatory in military drones and private drones that are
flown over other people's private land or public/government land. If that kind
of system doesn't exist then maybe someone should try to build it, "Open Crash
Avoidance" or something similar.

[http://gcn.com/articles/2013/07/12/drone-uav-sense-and-
avoid...](http://gcn.com/articles/2013/07/12/drone-uav-sense-and-avoid-
technologies-civilian-airspace.aspx)

~~~
jacquesm
The article focuses on military use of drones.

Crash avoidance systems are about saving the lives of the pilot more than
saving the craft. Drones coming down in one piece will give the enemy more
information than drones crashing so the cynic in me says that if you're
willing to fly drones over other countries' territory protecting their
population will take a back-seat to military objectives.

After all piloted craft come with ejection seats and parachutes for the pilots
_not_ with parachutes for the whole plane.

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autokad
when i was a kid (90s), i saw these planes going between the hills/tree tops.
they were too large to be a remote control plane, but too small to be a maned
aircraft. when i was in the woods i saw the belly of one of them going over
the tree tops 'us airforce', but didnt look like any plane that i knew of.
then there was this one night on the news about an airplane crash everyone was
calling in, but FAA and military was saying nothing crashed. however...

i go outside and there was about a dozen chinook helicopters coming my way.
they were going over the ground in a grid pattern. one of them stopped,
pointed lights, and landed. they were there for about 20-30 minutes and took
off. I would have checked it out but it was night time and I didnt have a
flash light.

this is the type of thing that makes people think UFO's exist. at the time i
knew something was going on, that the air force lost something and now they
found it, but I couldnt quite figure out what.

now that i know what i know now, i figured out they were testing drones in my
area, and they crashed one of them at night. (specifically an early form of
predator drones, propeller on back, some weird jet engine thingy on top, and a
strange bubbled front is how i would have described it)i guess my area outside
pittsburgh was ideal for testing, hills/trees, and they probably didnt think
anyone was paying attention.

