

Personal Drones Fly Above Burning Man - thejteam
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/aerial-robots/personal-drones-fly-above-burning-man

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bandy
The glaring omission I see in the article is any mention of BMORG's
photography policy, which is much stricter than US law. Some of the FPV ROVs
may be up there just to fly around…but it seems as if most of them exist for
photography's sake.

[http://www.burningman.com/press/photo_guide.html](http://www.burningman.com/press/photo_guide.html)

[http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html#pressRR](http://www.burningman.com/press/pressRandR.html#pressRR)

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toomuchtodo
Burning Man/Black Rock Rangers had an orientation you had to attend to get
permission to fly your own drone/quadrotor. I'm assuming you also had to agree
to their photography policy, which I'm okay with as I don't want pictures of
me riding my bicycle naked across the playa showing up on Flickr.

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aray
They probably had to also touch on the fact that many of them will be flying
FPV (first-person-view) with a headset, so dealing with those if they're
recorded as well (most aren't, so probably a non-issue).

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D9u
All it will take is one UAV crashing into some people, resulting in horrific
injuries, and the UAV will be banned, or more heavily regulated.

These UAV are not toys, and have a high potential to cause grave injuries.

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michaelwww
I agree. Burning Man has evolved from a very unsafe event towards more safety.
I doubt if we'll see any more blowing up oil derrick type events. Someone is
still going to try to take down a drone though, especially if it appears to
photographing naked people.

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olex
As long as the operator of the photographing UAV follows the same photography
rules and guidelines as the people running around with cameras on the ground,
I don't see a problem. Also, shooting down a UAV is a) illegal (property
damage) and b) even more dangerous that the actual UAV operation, since a
shot-down UAV will surely come down uncontrollably - the responsibility for
that damage will then rest on the shooter.

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michaelwww
Just as Burning Man is a test bed for civilian use of drones, it will also be
a test bed for civilian anti-drone measures. These don't actually have to
involve shooting it down, but people are already thinking about it

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/local-
an...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/local-anti-drone-
activism-begins-if-they-fly-in-town-we-will-shoot-them-down/278198/)

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michaelwww
It's going to turn into an all out semi-fun war of drone counter measures
(lasers, guns shooting plastic projectiles) and even drones battling other
drones in the sky. This should be interesting.

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pavel_lishin
I would imagine that a net-shooter would be the most effective weapon against
drones. Plus, it's a weapon that could feasibly be operated from a drone
itself without weighing too much, being too hard to aim, and minimizing human
casualties if it missed.

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baddox
I think radio jamming would be much cheaper and more effective. Most short-
range RC aircraft run on very widely-available consumer spectrum bands like
2.4GHz.

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toomuchtodo
Drones can operate completely autonomously, with no RF link.

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baddox
Indeed, they can be programmed to follow GPS waypoints for example, but I
don't think that's a common use case, especially for high production value
photography/videography like the examples highlighted in the article. Perhaps
it would become more common if radio jamming became more common.

