Can a Dog Fence in the Sky Stop Wayward Drones?

(Source: Bloomberg.com)  

They’ve buzzed the White House, come too close to planes, attempted to airlift drugs over prison walls and interfered with firefighters in California.

In fact, drones have been involved in so many incidents that some U.S. lawmakers are proposing to fight technology with technology — requiring an aerial version of an invisible dog fence to block unmanned aircraft from flying in sensitive areas.

Similar to how electronic fences zap dogs to keep them within boundaries, the fence-in-the-sky uses global-positioning systems to mark no-fly zones for drones. Trouble is, the systems, known as geo-fencing, may not be effective against the growing lawlessness in the skies.

Geo-fence technology can be overridden and it won’t work on older or cheaper models, education campaigns haven’t seemed to work so far and catching violators has proven almost impossible.

“As long as there’s YouTube and everybody’s competing for the coolest video, there’s going to be drones out there,” Jim Williams, the former chief of the Federal Aviation Administration’s unmanned aircraft division, said in an interview. “My confidence isn’t high that this will go away.”

Geo-fencing holds some of the best promise to rein in drone excesses, but will hardly be a panacea as the surge of drone incidents is expected to exceed 1,000 this year.

Before geo-fencing can be mandated, the government must first write regulations, an often cumbersome process that can take years, said Williams, who is now a drone-industry consultant at the Dentons US LLP law firm.

The technology also won’t work for cheaper models without GPS, he said. And as many as 1 million consumer drones have already been sold in the U.S., many of which may never be updated with geo-fence boundaries, he said.
“That’s great going forward, but the ones that are out there already are difficult,” Alex Mirot, president of the Unmanned Safety Institute, said. His Maitland, Florida, company trains drone operators and has advised airports on steps to address the risks created by unmanned aircraft.

The geo-fencing limits are also vulnerable to being disabled or hacked, said Kevin Finisterre, a computer security consultant in Columbus, Ohio, who has studied software on drones made by different manufacturers.

SZ DJI Technology Co., the Shenzhen, China-based firm that is the leading producer of consumer drones, already includes more than 6,700 restricted zones around the world in its geo-fencing software.

 

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