Imperial College in London is a mind-boggling labyrinth of ramps and walkways that might have been designed to test the IQ of visitors. The Aerial Robotics Laboratory is so well hidden that Mirko Kovac, its Swiss-born director, should offer academic credits to anyone who can find him. Kovac, a slight, precise man of 34, flits between tables as he demonstrates the lab’s latest prototype, a flying 3D printer modelled on the edible-nest swiftlet, a small Asian bird. “Our aim is to create designs inspired by nature,” he says. “They may look very different, but the underlying principles are the same.” His team has also built a robot that jumps and glides like a flying squirrel; while working at Harvard, Kovac developed a three-stage rocket, half the length of a Bic ballpoint, that mimics the boost-and-glide flight of butterflies. Kovac is softly spoken, which makes it all the more disarming when he puts forth his vision of the future. “We want to create machines that can live autonomously, building nests, repairing each other and reproducing within their own ecosystems.”

There will be no difficulty finding Imperial’s new Aerial Robotics Lab when it opens later this year. It is intended to be the focal point of the London campus, part aviary and part aquarium, with glass walls that will allow passersby to watch machines hover and dive, swim underwater or build nests in the roof space. It is a very public show of commitment by the university to the future of aerial robotics or, as they’re better known, drones.

We are familiar with drones as hi-tech toys, aerial cameras, even weapons of war – but flying 3D printers able to nest in the buildings they maintain and repair? This seems the stuff of science fiction. In a very short space of time, drones have become part of our everyday language and landscape: last year, Amazon shipped 20,000 toy drones worldwide in the runup to Christmas. But Kovac predicts we will soon be seeing flocks of aerial robots looking after oil pipelines, monitoring wildlife and forests, or working as land and sea rescue teams. “The technology is already there,” he says. “All this is within reach.” The next step is to incorporate the drones into smart cities, where they will fly in swarms like starlings to conserve energy, delivering mail, bouncing Wi-Fi signals, cleaning windows or monitoring traffic; and, of course, watching us.

In 2012, a Metropolitan police application to use drones as part of its crowd-control efforts for the London Olympics was rejected by the Civil Aviation Authority on safety grounds. Two years later, the risk of a drone falling from the sky was deemed to have lessened sufficiently for the CAA to grant licences to three UK police forces for observation drones; it now expects applications from many of the remaining forces. As drones become ever more present in our skies, the issues of privacy and intrusion are pressing, as is that of public safety. But for many the most urgent question is who, ultimately, controls this new technology: air defence analysts Teal Group predict that the combined market for military and commercial drones will be worth $89bn (£59bn) over the next 10 years.

Two frontrunners have already emerged. In April 2014, Google outbid Facebook to buy Titan Aerospace, a manufacturer of high-altitude drones that it hopes will provide viable alternatives to telecommunications satellites. Titan is just one of a dozen robotics companies bought by Google in the past few years, and last summer saw the tech giant testing mail drones in the Australian outback. Amazon, meanwhile, Google’s major rival in the drone race, ended 2014 testing its Prime Air drone service in rural Cambridgeshire.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivan Gayton: ‘Is it fun to play with? Sure, but it’s also a platform that’s running a mapping project in Ghana.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Guardian

There are, however, rebels who challenge these attempts at corporate dominance. Ivan Gayton, an amateur drone developer, is part of a community of enthusiasts who plan to work with open-source software and locally sourced parts to create a level global playing field. Like many others I speak to, Gayton is convinced we are on the cusp of a revolution that will bring drone technology within reach of all of us.

Gayton is a burly man of 40 with an infectious bounce. He shows off his flying skills in the small back garden of the London home he shares with his Japanese-born wife. His drone is a square of insulation foam and four propellers, christened the Ghetto Drone, and built by Gayton in his downtime from his desk job as emergency coordinator of Médecins Sans Frontières. It is difficult to believe a flying insulation tile might break the grip of the big technology giants. “It cost just £200, plus some sweat equity,” says Gayton, who slips easily into the language of the geek. “Of course, there are things that are too complicated to homebrew, like the motors and the brain.”

The brain, otherwise known as a stability board, is the essential piece of kit. This is the processor that keeps the four propellers spinning independently, speeding up and slowing down to keep the drone level and stable at all times. Gayton bought the brain and motors by mail order from China, and fixed them to his insulation tile with brackets printed on his domestic 3D printer. The camera is an old smartphone attached with elastic bands.

The Ghetto Drone hovers inches from his nose. “Is it a fun thing to play with?” he asks, rhetorically. “Sure. But it’s an extremely capable platform that can be programmed and sent on autonomous missions.” How useful is it? “It’s already up and running on a mapping project in Ghana.”

Gayton realised the importance of maps while working in Haiti, tracking the source of the 2010 cholera epidemic. He called in engineers from Google Maps, and together they traced the epidemic up river using Jeeps and boats. Within three years, this approach was already out of date. When a typhoon hit the Philippine city of Tacloban in 2013, a charity named Drone Adventures programmed a drone using Google coordinates to map the disaster area. Once a drone has coordinates, it will shuttle back and forth like an airborne photocopier, taking pictures of the ground below and converting them into detailed new maps.

Today, Gayton organises mapping parties in community halls in London with other like-minded enthusiasts, who get together to upload information to OpenStreetMap, the open-source rival to Google. Their aim is to map every part of the world where detailed charts do not yet exist, whether that is the alleyways of shanty towns or vast, unpaved areas of Africa and Bangladesh – the only exception being Palestine, which Israel forbids mapping under its own military laws. Inevitably, the places with the worst maps also have the worst roads, and drones can help here, too, bringing isolated villagers into the global community by improving communications and postal services.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former musician Alex Hardy makes drones for Hollywood; a client in the Gulf wants to use one as an aerial platform for his hawks. Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Guardian

At the moment, it is easier to use drones in Africa, where there is little or no regulation, than in the western world. If Mirko Kovac’s smart cities are to become a reality, there first needs to be a legal revolution. The CAA currently operates restrictions intended for model aircraft, which means that drones cannot be flown beyond human sightlines (assumed to be 150 metres), nor flown within 50 metres of any other object, which effectively bans drones from our cities, and certainly from our back gardens. There is spectacular aerial footage on YouTube of London landmarks – including Buckingham Palace and the Tower of London surrounded by its sea of red poppies – but all were filmed illegally, by tourists using drones.

The most draconian regulation, at least in the view of the drone community, is the insistence on drone supervision by a human operator, because it nullifies the dream of autonomous flight. CAA spokesman Richard Taylor tells me: “At the moment, drones have no inherent means of avoiding other objects.” But Kovac demurs. “No. Some do have crash-avoidance capabilities, and the research community puts a lot of effort into making machines that know where to go and what to avoid.” Possible early day solutions include sonar or more sophisticated GPS. The SenseFly drone, developed at Lausanne Institute of Technology, where Kovac studied for his PhD, uses a video system inspired by bumblebees. The closer a bee flies to an object, the more rapidly the image on its retina “reloads”, as it brings detailed features into sharper focus. “The bee calculates when to take evasive action, based on the speed of the rate of change,” Kovac explains. “It is an easy way to avoid obstacles without the need for additional sensors. When the SenseFly adopted a similar system, that was an early example of bio-inspired design.”

The US military has flown drones since the 1950s. It now has 10,000 machines operating under strict military secrecy.

Alex Hardy is the founder and owner of Vulcan UAV, a drone manufacturer on the edge of the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. His workshops were occupied by Xerox until 2010, when they stopped making photocopiers. He is also the manufacturers’ representative of the Association of Remote Piloted Aircraft Systems (Arpas), a recently established professional body that represents the UK drone industry. Hardy admits the name is a misnomer, perpetuating the fiction that drones are flown much like old-fashioned model aeroplanes. “The machines are inherently unstable. A human cannot fly one,” he says, explaining that wiggling a joystick simply sends a command to the robot brain; it is that brain that actually does the flying. “If you don’t touch the controls at all, it should hang in the air, more or less in one spot.”

Hardy is 47 and looks every inch the ex-motorcycle courier and session musician he became after dropping out of an economics degree at York University in his 20s. He is smoking a roll-up at his workshop door when I arrive, grinding it under his boot before showing me inside. A Syrian-born engineer, Rana Dekki, is soldering under a halogen lamp in the corner. Dekki has worked in the film industry, which is useful since half of Hardy’s machines are intended for aerial film work, but she developed her soldering skills working as a jewellery designer.

Dekki is working on a prototype with eight rotors, capable of lifting 35kg. The CAA puts an upper weight limit of 20kg on drones, so Dekki’s machine can only be flown abroad. Vulcan has built drones for the biggest Hollywood companies, and the machines are used worldwide in mining, construction and agriculture, for surveying and mapping. Hardy is currently fielding questions from a client in the Gulf, who wonders if a drone could be used as an aerial platform for his hawks. Hardy does not see why not.

This weekend, Dubai hosts the UAE Drones for Good award, a competition with a $1m prize for a drone used in a socially responsible project. Hardy has built one of the prize contenders, designed to plant forests in inhospitable terrain. “The drone has something like a paintball gun mounted below it,” he says, “so it fires the seed into the ground.” Lauren Fletcher of Biocarbon Engineering is the designer, and believes it has a good chance of winning: “The drones allow us to introduce industrial-scale reforestation in a way that was never really possible before.”

Hardy has been building multi-rotor machines for 15 years, at first as an amateur enthusiast. His ambition was straightforward: he wanted his own personal flying machine. “The concept was to build something I could stand in. I ended up with something that had two propellers, controlled by a remote in my hand. It kind of worked. And kind of didn’t.” Hardy laughs. He never fulfilled his dream of getting inside it: “It was insanely difficult to control.” The expensive flop is now gathering dust in a corner of his garage.

Through his years of limited success and conspicuous failure, Hardy experimented with gyroscopes and heat sensors, which were supposed to keep the machine upright by detecting the difference between sky and earth: “But you get a hot building, and suddenly the sensors could no longer tell which way was up.”

Ten years ago, the arrival of new, more autonomous drone brains changed Hardy’s life. He decided to go professional and is now at the forefront of a new industry. Like Kovac, he is concerned by the CAA regulations, but does not minimise the potential dangers of widespread drone use. Battery life is limited. The drones do not work well in poor weather: rain can affect the motors, strong winds can blow them off course, while cloud cover and solar flares interfere with GPS. “People don’t realise that GPS is not that reliable, especially in a city. It bounces off buildings, which can slow down signals. There’s also the risk of GPS jamming – jammers are supposed to be military-only technology, but you can buy a jammer on eBay.” A gadget called the TRC-3 Universal Jammer is, indeed, easily found online, and promises to jam the microwave signals between a GPS satellite and a drone, as well as your neighbour’s mobile phone, the remote-controlled garage door and everything else in the neighbourhood.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anish Mohammed: ‘We are being watched all the time. But visual intrusion is far less of a threat to our privacy than data tracking.’ Photograph: Suki Dhanda for the Guardian

Richard Taylor of the CAA expects drones to improve. “When they do, we will probably amend the regulations. As it is, we are trying to work with a light touch. The US has much stricter rules.”

Diana Cooper is a lawyer in the emerging field of robotics for LaBarge Weinstein, a US law firm. She also volunteers with Drone Adventures, the charity responsible for mapping the Tacloban disaster. She finds the situation in America ridiculous. “You cannot fly a drone within 30 miles of downtown DC, for instance, even a super-small hobby drone. The National Parks have banned drones entirely.” (This did not prevent an off-duty spy agency employee from flying his own hobby drone into the White House grounds last month while drunk.)

The US military has flown drones since the 1950s, and launched the first weaponised drone in 1994. It now has 10,000 machines operating under strict military secrecy. As a New Yorker investigation in November 2014 discovered, it is next to impossible to discover where US army missions are flown, where the operators are based or how many people have been killed by drones. A consequence of this secrecy, Kovac tells me, is that military and commercial drones have evolved along two separate paths. The military platforms rely on the same jet engines and aeronautical systems as conventional aircraft, Kovac says, “while smaller-scale drones have been fuelled by cellphone and consumer technology”.

This split between military and commercial applications has created space for ambitious newcomers to enter the market. These include the phenomenally successful DJI of China, whose blockbuster product, the Phantom, with its independently controlled, gimbal-mounted video camera, sells for between £400 and £1,000. Or the French company Parrot, which specialised in voice-recognition software, before moving into the high-end toy market with robots that could be operated by phones or iPads; it dramatically raised the stakes in 2012 when it bought the Lausanne-based SenseFly, the drone used by Drone Adventures. Meanwhile, US companies – including Amazon and Google, as well as smaller players – are testing their drones in Europe, where regulation is more relaxed. As Cooper says, “US companies want to gain experience and build a customer base before re-entering the home market, when conditions allow.”

Meanwhile, the US government has instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to deliver new guidelines by September this year. Kovac expects the US to liberalise, which will end the advantage currently enjoyed in the UK. The answer, he says, will be for UK manufacturers to “develop the same clear vision of the future”. The FAA is currently granting licences on an experimental basis, to gather data for the September report.

Last month, the broadcaster CNN got a licence to film over US cities. Yet the process of liberalisation may be far from smooth. The US military has a poor safety record: at least 49 military drones have crashed in America since 2001. In April 2014, a drone flown by a National Guard unit nose-dived into the ground outside a Pennsylvania school. A drone with a 20m wingspan has been missing over Lake Ontario since 2013, presumed to be in the water.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A jumping robot created by Mirko Kovac while doing his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. It was inspired by grasshoppers and can jump up to 1.4m, 27 times its own height. Photograph: LiS/EPFL 2008

Meanwhile, airline pilots’ associations in the UK and the US are determined to see the laws tightened, not loosened. They insist drones should be operated only by trained pilots – their members. The US pilots’ association has published a report covering 15 near-misses in the past two years, when drones have flown too close to commercial aeroplanes. In the UK, the air safety authority is investigating a report that a drone interfered with the landing of an Airbus at Heathrow in June 2014.

Lawyer Diana Cooper, however, believes that privacy laws will be a bigger obstacle than safety concerns. “Various localities in the US have drone privacy legislation or bills,” she says. The same cannot be said of the UK, where we are relatively relaxed about the widespread use of security cameras, for instance. Drones may offer a whole new level of intrusion, but the CAA appears to have no interest in privacy. The issue of intrusion was raised in a House of Lords inquiry into drones in October 2014, but only because Baroness O’Cathain discovered during the hearing that Google Maps had a satellite image of her rose garden – she was amazed that no one had told her.

Anish Mohammed is a 40-year-old technology activist with a medical degree from the University of Kerala that he has never used, and a day job advising banks on virtual currencies. He is deeply concerned about the privacy issues presented by drones, but believes the answer is to democratise technology, rather than concentrate power in fewer hands. Mohammed became interested in drones because he wanted to create a machine that could fly more gracefully than he could ever hope to. He happily admits he is a maladroit operator: “I crash more than most people.”

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We meet in a park in Woking, Surrey, where the innards of several drones are scattered around Mohammed’s feet. A sleek, white DJI Phantom is ready to fly, or so he believes. While he fiddles with his controls, I calculate we are far less than 50 metres from the nearest house; in fact, we are less than 50 metres from a path where a woman in a voluminous black coat is being dragged by a husky. And Mohammed recently crashed a drone – in the driveway of his own home. “I triggered the auto-mode and it went straight up to 10 metres,” he says. “I brought it straight down again. But it didn’t survive.” I keep quiet about my safety concerns as the propellers whirr and the Phantom rises from the ground. It hangs for a few moments above Mohammed’s head, then a light blinks and the drone crashes to earth.

Mohammed laughs and shrugs. He explains that he replaced the Phantom’s brain with a new one he can program at home. He is exploring the developing field of landmark recognition in his spare time – a technology that will enable drones to follow roads and buildings, rather than rely on GPS coordinates – but it’s clearly early days, and Mohammed’s drone has flown its last today.

“We are being watched all the time,” he tells me as he packs up. “But visual intrusion is far less of a threat to our privacy than data tracking of the kind carried out by companies like Facebook. The risks to privacy are in the virtual world.” This sentiment is echoed by both Kovac and Gayton, who feel that the openness of drone technology is far more important than its regulation, so that Amazon, Google and other big corporations are not given the freedom to carve up the future.

Overriding all these concerns, when speaking to drone enthusiasts, is the sheer excitement they get from the possibility of flight. Inside Gayton is a Peter Pan who takes flight whenever his Ghetto Drone lifts off the ground. Kovac is a careful, contained man, yet he glows with enthusiasm when he imagines his new Aerial Robotics Lab. Cooper loves the vantage point she gets from following the path of her drones on her tablet screen: “You see your world from another perspective.” But perhaps Hardy articulates it best: “What is the dream? To fly.”

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