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[Roger Clarke]

At 4:47 +0000 3/12/13, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>Also seem to me that it would be smart to simply make them fly X metres
>above the existing roads. The roads are already quite accurately mapped.
>With GPS and existing navigation maps, they could track to the left and
>right of road centres, and, along existing delivery transport corridors.

That gaurantees that, when failures occur, out-of-control drones will 
frequently impact on and/or in front of road vehicles, or on 
buildings beside major roads, or into wires.

Over congested roads they would often cause direct damage to cars, 
buildings, infrastructure and/or people.  Over less congested roads 
they would more often cause indirect damage from end-on-end accidents 
following impact on the tarmac.  With unclogged roads (e.g. 
23:00-4:30 except on Fri-Sat and Sat-Sun?), the likelihood of both 
direct and indirect damage would be lower because there are fewer 
valuable assets available to be hit.

Note that the 400ft rule places an upper limit of about 36 storeys on 
the flight-path.

Again quoting from the much-unloved document:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/SOS/Drones-E.html#Impl
>A particular concern is the wide array of `failure modes' that 
>afflict drones. The earliest UK use for law enforcement purposes 
>culminated in the drone's loss in the Mersey River off Liverpool 
>(BBC 2011). The earliest media use identified in Australia ended 
>with the drone crashing, fortunately for those in the detention 
>centre that had been filmed, in the adjacent Indian Ocean (Corcoran 
>2012). A similar cautionary tale arises from the demonstration of 
>what was claimed to be the first police-owned drone, in Texas - a 
>large and expensive drone rather than a micro-drone. It crashed into 
>a police vehicle which was, fortunately, armoured (Biddle 2012). 
>Then, in Incheon, South Korea, a large, commercial drone crashed 
>into its control truck, killing an engineer and injuring two pilots 
>who were `remote', but insufficiently so (Marks 2012). There have 
>also been crashes of micro-drones in the central business districts 
>of Auckland (Mortimer 2012) and Sydney (Kontominas 2013). Accident 
>investigation reports for these incidents have not been located, but 
>media reports have suggested that the causes have been interruptions 
>to GPS or control-flow transmissions, coupled with inadequate 
>fail-safe designs to cope with signal-loss. These accidents give 
>rise to ample cause for concern about the potential for harm to 
>people and property, and highlight the need for an assessment of the 
>adequacy of existing regulatory frameworks for public safety.

________________________________________________________________________

>>  On 3 December 2013 13:19, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at internode.on.net> wrote:
>>
>>  > That's where the system problems come in. Cars are part of a cultural
>>  > system. Millions of them travel roads every day. There are accidents.
>>  > But people know how to behave in that cultural system, pretty much.
>>  >
>>  > UAVs are anomalies in that system. We have wires and poles and signs
>>  > and plants and all sorts of physical objects in spaces where cars
>>  > don't go. I guess you could put in some sort of avoidance sensor like
>>  > aerial rhumbas??? But what is the distinction between a porch roof
>>  > and the door step? Where is the package going to end up? What is the
>>  > rule set? The non-road spatial objects are practically infinite.
>>  >
>>  > Jan
>>  >
>>  >
>>  >
>>  > Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
>>  > jwhit at janwhitaker.com
>>  >
>>  > Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how
>>  > do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your
>>  > space.
>>  > ~Margaret Atwood, writer
>>  >
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-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Tel: +61 2 6288 6916                        http://about.me/roger.clarke
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University