Amazon, NASA team up to create drone air-traffic system

Amazon, NASA team up to create drone air-traffic system

PanARMENIAN.Net - The first wave of long-range commercial drones should be allowed to operate in a narrow, low-altitude band and must agree to be tracked, according to Amazon.com Inc.’s vision of the future, Bloomberg reports.

While U.S. government regulations now just allow limited usage of unmanned flights, Amazon is creating a blueprint for an air-traffic system and the necessary technology is rapidly maturing, said Gur Kimchi, a vice president who heads the company’s drone-delivery division.

“It’s completely doable,” Kimchi told Bloomberg News, laying out for the first time how the company envisions an orderly system guiding small, unmanned delivery aircraft. He is unveiling the company’s view at a conference Tuesday, July 28, sponsored by NASA at its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Having a traffic cop in the skies is essential before the world’s largest online retailer can revolutionize how packages are delivered using drones. The stakes are enormous for Amazon, Google Inc. and scores of other companies that want to develop drone commerce, from power-line inspections to farm surveys.

A team at NASA’s facility adjacent to Silicon Valley is leading the government’s efforts to create a, dubbed Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management.

More than 100 companies have expressed interest in participating in NASA’s effort and at least 14 have signed agreements to work with the agency, including giants of technology and communications, such as Google, Amazon, Verizon Communications Inc. and Harris Corp.

Amazon says the only way drones can dart across the skies without hitting each other or threatening traditional aircraft is to require that the equivalent of flight plans be filed and drones communicate their positions to a centralized computer system available to all operators.

Key to creating a safe system is at least initially to keep unmanned vehicles away from traditional planes and helicopters, Kimchi noted. It’s much more complicated to create a system in which drones routinely fly among other aircraft, he said, according to Bloomberg.

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