Skip to main content

There's hope for my drone - The FAA makes provisional drones ruling

So finally the FAA has released its take on how to regulate the commercial use of drones or unmanned aircraft on USA territory. It's mostly good news although, some companies (like Amazon) will not be too happy. The gist of the rules are as follows (copied from here):

  • Unmanned aircraft must weigh less than 55 lbs. (25 kg).
  • Visual line-of-sight (VLOS) only; the unmanned aircraft must remain within VLOS of the operator or visual observer.
  • At all times the small unmanned aircraft must remain close enough to the operator for the operator to be capable of seeing the aircraft with vision unaided by any device other than corrective lenses.
  • Small unmanned aircraft may not operate over any persons not directly involved in the operation.
  • Proposes a microUAS option that would allow operations in Class G airspace, over people not involved in the operation, provided the operator certifies he or she has the requisite aeronautical knowledge to perform the operation.
  • Daylight-only operations (official sunrise to official sunset, local time).
  • Maximum airspeed of 100 mph (87 knots).
  • Maximum altitude of 500 feet above ground level.

The only thing that might not be coherent with the CAA draft proposal, is the requirement of RPL (remotely piloted license). The FAA has requested for feedback and comments on these regulations and we hope that Aviation authorities in African continents will follow suit once guys like us come along with our little 'demons of the skies'

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up the Tarot T4-3D gimbal on the Pixhawk 2.4.8 with Specktrum dx6 Gen2 toggle switch

So i took the challenge of setting up the Tarot gimbal not just for inherent stable video footage but also the flexibility of controlling it from the radio control. However, I encountered quite a few challenges which made me aware that I'm not the one only in this battle . It's quite clear that the setup of the Tarot gimbal using its own software is completely different from how it's been described in the Ardupilot/Arducopter webpage and in mission Planner. In Mission Planner and it's associated site makes one believe that it should be done through software, only to realize that in actual fact the setup is more complex than that.  After two evenings of trying various combinations, I realized the getting the pixhawk Aux channels to communicate with the T4 gimbal requires the following steps: - The Pixhawk Pin9 (Aux1) needed to be activated to pass through user-chosen channel from the transmitter. For the Dx6 Gen2 it was the channel 6, which can assigned the ...

Matlab to C/C++ code development - Some learning points

Over the last few years, the engineers at the company have invested both their time and sleepless nights in formulating a process for the development of Machine learning algorithms that will satisfy real-time constraints with minimal RAM usage. This is quite a tall task as per default, that would force one to do their development directly in C language. Although that seems like the right choice, the downside is the direct correlation of the debugging time with algorithm complexity.  Such a time could have been rather used in optimizing the algorithm within the MATLAB environment which has excellent tools for the analysis, plotting and debugging. So it was decided to rather learn the Code generation process with the hope that future algorithm could be designed in a similar fashion without the hassle of the compiler-specific run-time issues. The development of this machine learning algorithm would eventually be implemented in a 32bit, 160Mhz speed, 260KB RAM microcontroll...

Setup ArduPilot flight modes with DX6 Gen 2

Hi, I've looked around the web to get an understanding the setup of the Ardupilot flight modes with a Spektrum DX6 2nd generation and there was none. So I decided to write this blog. The few things to consider when doing this: Please follow the instruction given on the ardupilot webpage . Have the Pixhawk hardware connected to Mission Planner (I have 1.3.50 - Copter V3.5.3)  Use the display bar in the Radio Calibration page as a guide while changing the rate pulse widths on your transmitter. I've used switch D to change the pulse width ranges on channel 5.