White House trumpets drone projects

Hot on the heels of the UK Government’s decision to work with Amazon on delivery drone trials, the US Government has now trumpeted the drone projects that it is currently supporting. In a briefing statement issued yesterday (2 August), the White House said that its Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is “announcing new steps, sustained by public and private support, to promote the safe integration and innovative adoption of unmanned aircraft systems across the United States”.

The OSTP said that the announcements build on the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s  “Small UAS” rule, which (as previously reported by Post&Parcel) was published in June to provide national guidelines for the operation of non-recreational unmanned aircraft under 55 pounds.

Some of the interesting snippets from the White House document include:

• the announcement of a $5m down-payment by the state of New York to support the growth of the emerging unmanned aircraft systems industry across New York;
• and details of how $35m in research funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) will be used over the next five years to “accelerate the understanding of how to intelligently and effectively design, control, and apply UAS to beneficial applications”.

While the UK government may be working with Amazon Prime Air, the US authorities are teaming with another big beast of the Internet, the Google spin-off Alphabet. Yesterday’s statement from the White House confirmed that Project Wing “will conduct an operational research study at one of the six FAA UAS Test Sites to gain full operational experience of its delivery service in a safe testing environment”.

The White House statement added: “Data gathered will be shared with government partners to help regulators answer critical safety and human factors questions for UAV cargo delivery operations.

“Project Wing is planning for the testing to include operations with external cargo loads and to build towards beyond line of sight (BLOS) capabilities.

“The company will also begin to develop and deploy an open-interface, airspace management solution for safe low-altitude small UAS (sUAS) operations using existing low cost, scalable communication and information technologies. The work, which will focus on encouraging good citizenship in operation and collaboration between and across industry and government, will help ensure safe integration of sUAS in the layer of airspace under 400 feet.”

Focusing on the use drones for delivering mail and packages, the White House statement also said that the United States Postal Service Office of Inspector General is announcing its intention to publish new findings and analysis on the public’s rapidly-evolving opinion of drone delivery as a potential future logistics technology”.

“Several topics are covered in the study,” said the White House statement, “including the opinion of survey respondents to unmanned aircraft delivery’s overall appeal, its most and least compelling applications, the believability of claims about its potential benefits, the public’s expected timeframe for implementation of operations, potential downsides of the proposed technology, and how the public would view drone delivery if it were offered by the U.S. Postal Service and a small collection of other interested organizations.”

Flirtey – the drone company which recently partnered with 7-Eleven to complete the first fully autonomous drone delivery to a customer’s residence in the US – is also mentioned in the White House statement for the work it is doing with nonprofit International Medical Corps regarding humanitarian applications for drone delivery technology.

Quite a few players in the drone sector – including Flirtey – were disappointed that the FAA’s rules for drone usage currently specify that drone must be in line of sight of operator. Indeed, this was said to be a sticking point that reportedly prompted Amazon to site its drone trials in the UK. It was, therefore, interesting to see that the White House statement highlighted the results of PrecisionHawk’s Phase I Pathfinder tests, which aimed to demonstrate the safety of extended visual line of sight (EVLOS) operations for drones in rural areas.

The White House issued its briefing document as part the OSTP Workshop on Drones and the Future of Aviation which took place yesterday. Click here to access the full White House statement.