A Drone Air-Traffic System Should Manage the Lower Sky. Here’s How

Interface concept for an autonomous agriculture-drone-system

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) such as drones will soon change our urban and rural landscape and the way we live together. They could help us fight diseases more efficiently with flying mosquito traps, deliver goods faster from drone airports to any remote part of the world, improve search and rescue missions after an earthquake, providing web access from above, and will help to feed our growing population of 9.7 billion people by 2050 (more of that later).

But there is one big question which arises in that context: How do we manage and control this growing air traffic in the lower sky?

NASA is working on a low-altitude airspace management

There is no clear airspace system to control the lower sky, yet

Dynamic geo-fencing (see below) and collision avoidance is one of the first necessary steps to avoid collisions with buildings, larger aircrafts, helicopters, gliders, balloons and parachutists. For that an alert system could track UAVs in real-time to report flight paths and alert them of unanticipated hazards such as severe weather and wind or congestion.

An interesting approach is to implement a system of roads, corridors, lanes, rules and if necessary stop signs and lights that govern UAVs such as researchers at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore proposed. This airspace system could have autonomous characteristics that include self-configuration, self-optimization and even self-protection.

But even if the current groundbreaking innovations in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning will soon enable this autonomous systems, humans will want to have a visual representation of the UAV’s activities and might have to intervene in processes.