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By Mary-Lou Smulders
Chief Marketing Officer, Dedrone
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How big is the drone market? You may think it's still emerging, but the opposite is true: it's here, and it's quickly growing beyond the hobbyist and defense industry. Statista predicts that the largest sector of the drone market will be logistics in just seven short years, but drones can do more than just deliver packages. Drones can monitor plant health in agriculture, serve as first responders in emergencies, capture astonishing aerial photos, perform dazzling drone shows, and more.
To say that all of this involves a significant sum of money would be an understatement: that same research predicts the drone market will reach USD $91 billion in 2030, up from just under $15 billion in 2020. But like every tool humans have created, with these productive applications come added security concerns for everyday citizens. One cannot build a barrier strong or tall enough to protect from a malicious drone. This fact, combined with the knowledge that drones are becoming cheaper and gaining range and payload capabilities every day, shows drones have become today's largest asymmetric threat to both public safety and national defense. How can we make the drone economy safe for everyone while still allowing it to flourish? There are three key areas we must address: technological solutions, laws and regulations, and collaboration between stakeholders.
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While the drone industry still refers to technological solutions as counter- or anti-drone solutions, the real objective of these technologies is airspace security: protecting people, property, and information from the threat of nefarious or errant drones while allowing benign drones to fly—pun intended.
In the current market, the majority of solutions on the market focus on DTI: detection, tracking, and identification of a drone. Detecting a drone's presence and tracking its flight path today is most commonly done using a DJI AeroScope. There are additional tools that can be used to detect and track non-DJI drones and their pilots, including radio frequency sensors, cameras, and radars.
The higher the sensitivity of the area or zone being protected, the more security layers professionals will implement. This is because each of these types of technologies have limitations. For example, DJI AeroScopes cannot detect non-DJI made drones, and radars often produce false positives while pure RF solutions have more limited range. A command and control (C2) platform enables security professionals to see the single best view of the sky as mined from multiple sensor modalities and fused into a single picture of the airspace above to determine what kind of drone is flying and its exact location.
Both benign drone use cases and mitigation methods are limited due to the current regulations in the United States. For example, current regulations do not distinguish between crewed aircraft (such as a passenger plane) and uncrewed aircraft (like a drone), meaning that mitigating a drone threat is limited to getting the pilot to land the drone for most entities. Interfering with a drone, like jamming it, would be illegal today in most cases. Only the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security can currently mitigate a drone. There are multiple solutions available: a jammer to sever the connection between the drone and its pilot, causing the drone to fly back to its starting position; hacking into the drone and taking it over; and kinetically stopping the drone with a net or another drone.
There are also limitations around how a pilot can navigate a drone, namely that it cannot currently be flown beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), fly over people or at night without special FAA-granted waivers.
These limitations mean that Amazon's Prime Air, for example, is only testing deliveries in two small test markets, can't fly its delivery drones over roads or people, and can't deliver to more than a few houses despite having plans for using drones to enable even faster deliveries. For law enforcement or emergency services to use drones as first responders BVLOS, they must obtain waivers from the FAA — and only a few agencies are in possession of these certificates of authorization.
As I've previously discussed, promising bills are currently being considered in Congress. In particular, the expansion of authorities around who can use what kinds of mitigation tools could help both law enforcement and security professionals devise updated protocols for responding to threats. Furthermore, some advanced detection methods are currently forbidden for use by laws that were never designed for these kinds of technologies, such as the Wiretap Act. Take, for instance, a drone stopping two football games over one weekend. If the drone had been mitigated the first time, would the second incident have occurred? Or perhaps the drone could have been mitigated before it became a threat and thus not interfered with the game in the first place?
This is why collaboration between stakeholders will be critical as our federal government devises new laws. Professional sporting leagues have previously made it clear what they believe is needed. Equally, the FBI has testified to Congress that they are now investigating multiple drone incidents at critical infrastructure sites.
In short, these different stakeholders, both public and private, can offer different perspectives on what exactly is needed in these regulations to ensure they are clear and fair for everyone, from the hobbyist pilot to state, local, territorial, and tribal (SLTT) law enforcement to federal agencies and private critical infrastructure security professionals. Just as there is no one-size-fits-all solution for airspace security, there cannot be a one-size-fits-all drone regulation solution when there are so many different uses for drones.
The drone economy has officially arrived. What matters now is allowing drones to reach their full potential by ensuring they are safely integrated into society. Technology and laws can go a long way in making this a reality, but it is this last point — collaboration between public and private entities — that will be key. Creating this mutual understanding between stakeholders can lead to better, safer implementations of drones in the economy.
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