Major retailers have been quietly road testing for years the use of drones for product deliveries and warehouse management, but until very recently the universe interested in the commercial application of unmanned aerial systems has been a narrow one.
That’s changing in the wake of a new federal framework taking shape now.
While the U.S. government has deliberately slow-walked the most audacious drone practices until regulators can address critical public safety concerns, progress in the direction of a Jetsons-like sky of robotic vehicles has been made.
In June, the Federal Aviation Administration, which exerts regulatory authority over US airways, published rules for the use of small drones–a critical first step in accelerating commercial drone applications.
Those rules, which took affect only last month, limit flights to daylight or civil twilight and require that the drones, weighing no more than 55 pounds, must remain within the operator’s line-of-sight at a maximum altitude of 400 feet. (A Chinese company, EHang, has already developed passenger drones that are completely autonomous, though FAA rules would require certification as a manned vehicle even if the passenger is not controlling the craft.)
While the FAA’s rules stop short of permitting broad scale product delivery, they exceed the regulatory regime imposed by much of the rest of the developed world.
(No developed nation has approved routine delivery of products, but federal regulators recently approved earlier this month the delivery of burritos to the campus of Virginia Tech by Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., and Mexican quick service chain Chipotle.)
But even as the FAA’s flight restrictions have impeded the most grandiose of drone applications–like automated deliveries and pickups–some intrepid clinicians have begun testing new drone applications for medical treatment within the existing framework.
Pathologists at Seattle, Washington’s Harborview Medical Center recently tested the impact of UAS flights on blood samples, performing a clinical study in which they found that biologics were unharmed in the course of flight, according to NPR.
In sparsely populated or remote areas (like those in Ghana, where health care workers are using drones to deliver contraceptives), accessing and transporting biologic samples can be a costly undertaking.
But unmanned drones could not only reduce transport time but also the transportation cost. Absent more permissive federal regulations, though, those samples will have to stay grounded. For now, that is: FAA estimates that some 60,000 commercially-operated drones will take flight within the next year.
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