I believe that people mixing up two possibilities here.
1. The US export limitations
2. Safety of civil drones
1. These US companies are not enemies of their own money. If
they do not accept international orders then most probably they
are not allowed to do so. Imho it has no relation to civil
regulations of foreign countries. Its more likely that US
lawmakers are realizing that that a small cheap aircraft with
autonomous flight capabilities can be used as weapon. And I
would not underestimate the technical/programming skills of the
villains.
2. Safety: I am working with safety critical systems so I am
biased. Biased and scared to see drone pilots flying above a
crowd with relatively large and heavy "pro" multicopters for the
best vide shot. Also scared to know that the uavs out in the
wild are using mechanical and electrical and software systems
that were never _designed_ to be safe (= if they are, its mere
luck). There are good layman attempts in a number of projects
(redundancy, failsafe devices, watchdog etc) that are addressing
a certain safety aspect, but safety is always a system concern.
System level safety concepts are still widely missing. The good
news for paparazzi: there is such a safety reasoning that "safe
by proven-in-use" i.e. if a device was designed before the
safety regulations were introduced, its safety can be proven by
the number of hours that it has been used without accident. For
example, Google has quickly realized that they could not
re-design all software, including the gazillion of OSS
components that they use in their autonomous cars. So they are
cruising around, with a safety driver, since years, collecting
the "proof" for in-use. Imho the same argument can be used for
the paparazzi project, too. Collecting the proof of the accident
free flights with certain stable software branches of paparazzi
may be challenging but not impossible. This makes paparazzi
project a good candidate for one of the "trusted" autopilot
software used in civil drones. In my eyes this must come along
with certain system level considerations that may include safe
mechanical design and safe configuration too. I am also trained
in and aware what are the DO-254 and DO-178 regulations of the
aerospace industry, but I hope that the lawmakers do not enforce
these on drones. The cost implications of these standards are
enormous. Hope there will be a good compromise in the
regulations that clarifies the liabilities too.
Regards
Karoly
Sent from my iPad
On May 18, 2014, at 12:22 AM, "Paolo Bernasconi" <
address@hidden>
wrote:
PS: to be more accurate: one such accident
involving an auto piloted RC model
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