Drone safety

​​For tall their potential, the utility of non-military drones as a weapon of war and terror is an unfortunate byproduct of their proliferation. This reality has played out in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas over the weekend.

​If there's one thing that's scary about quadcopter drones – besides their ability to invade peoples' privacy or fall on their heads – it's those fast-spinning rotor blades. An experimental new system, however, is designed to stop the rotors before they can do any cutting.

​When Canadian engineers Omar Eleryan and Simon Czarnota first tried flying a regular drone, they were put off by how big, loud, hard to control and potentially dangerous it was. That prompted them to form Cleo Robotics, and develop the donut-shaped Cleo drone.

​Many of the applications for drones will see them fly high up in open airspace, but safely moving through denser urban areas at street level would be a handy capability, too. Researchers have come up with a control system for drones that enables them to autonomously navigate these busier settings

As consumer drones have become more commonplace, so too have concerns that owners might use them for snooping. Researchers have now developed a way to uncover such activity, coming up with a way to intercept a drone's radio signals and tell whether it's been filming things that it shouldn't.

Public safety is central to Amazon's drone delivery plans, and a new patent shows the company is thinking outside the square in this regard. It is considering drones that can break apart in midair, to spread the loads of metal and plastic raining down if something goes wrong.​​

DJI has moved to allay some of the privacy concerns surrounding drones, introducing a new feature dubbed AeroScope, which broadcasts information such as serial numbers and altitude to help authorities monitor the whereabouts of individual aircraft. ​​

Hundreds of thousands of hobbyists have now registered their devices with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). As it turns out, however, they drone registry wasn't well, entirely legal, with an appeals court striking down the rule and leaving the registry dead in the water. ​

​As more drones crowd into the airspace, we’re going to need measures to keep them from crashing into each other. Researchers are teaching drones a few simple rules to help them avoid collisions on their own.

​One of the big worries about the widespread use of drones is the possibility that if they stop working, they might fall from the sky and hit someone on the head. As a result, NASA is now developing a system in which drones automatically select the best place to land in the event of a malfunction.

A study issued by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has sought to bring some figures into the discussion around the dangers of drones, finding, among other things, the chances of a head injury from a falling drone to be 0.03 percent.

​​One of the big worries regarding the widespread use of drones is that if their motors fail, they could plummet out of the sky and hit us on the head. That's why Meteomatics is developing a quadcopter that can spin its way down like a top.​