[TriLUG] OT: Drone Zone

[Charles West via TriLUG]

Hey Tim,

I'm a NC State graduate student working with NGAT, a NC DOT program.
Making drones use legal and safe in North Carolina is kind of our mission
mandate.  We are part of the ASSURE alliance, which is helping the FAA try
to figure out how it is going to do airspace integration.

I am also personally interested furthering Robotics as a Service (
http://abotforthat.com) at NC State and am working on several open source
projects that will hopefully make it easier to create and deploy robotic
services.  These include Society of Machines (for scalable secure command
and control of large robotics,
https://github.com/charlesrwest/societyOfMachines), PylonGPS (for sharing
of basestation data for enhanced GPS accuracy, http://pylongps.com), and
the pedestrian robot project (a APM based rover which we are trying to be
able to make navigate sidewalks and cross the street safely for local real
time cargo delivery).  I have a proposal (
http://abotforthat.com/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=dronerefairspacecontrol.pdf)
for an open source architecture for integrating drones with our existing
airspace (preventing in air collisions with plans and other objects).  We
are also working on making NC State University an official member of
Dronecode, which is a Linux foundation supported project/alliance to create
open source software for control/use of drones (https://www.dronecode.org/).

Feel free to get in touch if you (or anyone else) have questions about
drones or would like to get involved with any of these projects (mostly
C/C++ in a Linux environment).  The pedestrian robot in particular is an
open platform which is based on a Raspberry Pi 2.

There are also a whole bunch of rules (primarily federal) for flying
commercial drones which we can help people navigate (I also know a legal
place that is specializing in that area).  Sadly, they are being largely
ignored by many companies (which is also probably one of the drivers of the
FAA's struggle to work out a new/better legal framework)

Thanks,
Charlie West

P.S.
Most of those drone races are happening over at the Dorothea Dix field with
the first person flying club (http://www.meetup.com/F1-FPV/).  They are
reasonably safety conscious.

Phone: 8285829051
email: crwest at ncsu.edu

On Sat, Jul 11, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Tim Jowers via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> Exactly why we need a designated zone! Or we can just put all the ideas
> into the next tomorrowland movie alongside flying cars et al. :)
> On Jul 11, 2015 7:58 AM, "Peter Neilson via TriLUG" <trilug at trilug.org>
> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 11 Jul 2015 07:37:50 -0400, Mauricio Tavares via TriLUG <
> > trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> >
> >        Stupid question: where does the liability stay? Is the company
> >> going to cover for accidents both drone operator and customer?
> >>
> >
> > In some rural places if your dog comes onto my property and "worries" my
> > livestock (causes them to run through fences, or attacks them and tears
> > them up) I have the legal right to shoot your dog. (If it were you,
> > yourself, I would generally not have the right to shoot you, however.)
> > Should I have a right to shoot down a trespassing drone that panics my
> > horses? Should drones carry large and visible registration numbers like
> > cars and airplanes?
> > --
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> --
> This message was sent to: Charlie West <crwest at ncsu.edu>
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