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The United States Federal Aviation Administration has been desperately trying to keep up with the proliferation of recreational and commercial drones. They haven’t been as successful as all of us might have wanted, but some progress is certainly being made, most recently with some new rules about flying drones at night and over people and vehicles, as well as the requirement for a remote-identification system for all drones.

Over the next few years, FAA’s drone rules are going to affect you even if you just fly a drone for fun in your backyard, so we’ll take detailed look about what changes are coming and how you can prepare.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the FAA, as an agency, is turning out to be a very poor communicator where drones are concerned. I’ve written about this before, but understanding exactly what you can and cannot do with a drone, and where you’re allowed to do it, is super frustrating and way more complicated than it needs to be. So if some of this seems confusing, it’s not you.

Part of the problem is that the FAA has separated drone pilots into two categories that have rules that are sometimes different in ways that don’t always make sense. There are recreational pilots, who fly drones “strictly for recreational purposes,” and then there are commercial pilots, who fly drones to make money, for non-profit work, for journalism, for education, or really for anything that has a goal besides fun.

Recreational pilots are allowed to fly under safety guidelines from a “community-based organization” like the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), while commercial pilots have to fly under the rules found in Part 107 of the Federal Aviation Regulations. So, while the Part 107 rules have, for example, prohibited flying at night without a waiver from the FAA, the FAA also says that recreational flyers can fly at night as long as the drone “has lighting that allows you to know its location and orientation at all times.” Go figure.

You can find these on FAA’s website:

Late last year, the FAA released what it called in a press release “Two Much-Anticipated Drone Rules to Advance Safety and Innovation in the United States.”

The first update is for Part 107 pilots, and covers operations over people, over vehicles, and at night. Currently, Part 107 pilots need to apply to the FAA for waivers to do any of these things, and now you do not need a waiver to do them, as long as you follow the new rules.

The second new rule is about how drones identify themselves in flight, called Remote ID, and applies to everybody flying a drone, even if it’s just for fun. If you’re a recreational pilot, you can skip down to the part about Remote ID, which will affect you.

Yup. The new rule allows for night flying with a properly lit up drone (“anti-collision lights that can be seen for 3 statute miles and have a flash rate sufficient to avoid a collision”). The rule also helpfully notes that these lights must be turned on.

This applies to Part 107 pilots only, and as we noted above, whether recreational fliers can fly at night isn’t as clear as it should be. And Part 107 pilots who want to take advantage of this new rule will need to take an updated knowledge test, which the FAA will provide more information on within the next few months.

Generally, yes, if you’re a Part 107 pilot. You can fly over moving vehicles as long as you’re just transiting over them, rather than maintaining sustained flight over them. If you want to maintain sustained flight, you can do that too, although in that case everyone in the vehicle needs to know that there’s a drone around and it has to be in an access controlled area.

Vehicles, as far as the FAA is concerned, includes anything where a person is moving more quickly than they’d be able to on foot, because this rule exists to try and mitigate the likelihood of a wayward drone hitting someone at a higher speed. Vehicles therefore include skateboards, rollerblades, bicycles, roller coasters, boats, and so on.

Part 107 pilots are now allowed to fly over people in some circumstances, under restrictions that change depending on how big and scary your drone is. The FAA has separated drones into four risk categories, based on how much damage they could do to a human that they come into contact with.

To fly over people, you must be flying under Part 107, your drone must be in one of the four categories above, and you’ll need to follow these specific rules on outdoor flight over people. Note that the FAA defines “sustained flight over an open-air assembly” as “hovering above the heads of persons gathered in an open-air assembly, flying back and forth over an open-air assembly, or circling above the assembly in such a way that the small unmanned aircraft remains above some part of the assembly.”

Part 107 pilots can still apply to the FAA for waivers, just like before.

Definitely not over people or vehicles. Maybe at night, but honestly, best not to do that either?

The FAA describes Remote ID as being like a digital license plate for your drone. If you’re following the rules, you’re currently required to register your drone (unless it’s very small) and then make that registration number visible on the drone somewhere.

This isn’t particularly useful if you’re someone on the ground trying to identify a drone flying overhead, so the FAA is instead requiring that all drones broadcast a unique identifying number whenever they’re airborne.

Most likely not. This is a brand new requirement.

Every drone that weighs more than 0.55 pounds (0.25 kg). Drones weighing less than that may be required to have Remote ID if they’re being flown under Part 107.

If you have a drone that weighs under 0.55 pounds and fly recreationally, then lucky you, you don’t have to worry about Remote ID.

The FAA only says that drones “must be designed to maximize the range at which the broadcast can be received,” but it’ll be different for each drone. The target seems to be 400 feet, which is what the FAA figures maximum line of sight distance to be. There was some discussion about making network identification an option (like, if your drone can talk to the Internet somehow, it doesn’t have to broadcast directly), but the FAA thought that would be too complicated. 

According to the FAA: “Most personal wireless devices within range of the broadcast.” In other words, anyone with interest and a mobile phone will be able to locate both nearby drones and the GPS coordinates of whoever is piloting them.

Only the FAA will be able to correlate the drone’s ID number with your personal information, although they’ll share with law enforcement if requested.

Part of the Remote ID specification is that the user should not have the ability to disable it, and if you somehow manage to anyway, the drone should then refuse to take off.

September 2023. You’ve got some time!

Manufacturers have 18 months to start integrating Remote ID into their products.

The good news is that at least in some cases, it sounds like even the current generation of drones will be able meet Remote ID requirements. As one example, we spoke with Brendan Groves, head of policy and regulatory affairs at Skydio, about what Skydio’s plans are for Remote ID going forward, and he made us feel a little better, saying they are tracking this issue closely and that they are “committed to making Skydio 2s in use now compliant with the new rule before the deadline.”

Of course, different drone makers will have different answers, so if you own a drone you should ask the manufacturer about for more information.

Remote ID doesn't have to be directly integrated into your drone, and the FAA expects that add-on Remote ID broadcast modules will be available.

Sure, but the FAA has to approve it.

The FAA will partner with educational and research institutions and community-based organizations to establish defined areas in which drones can fly in line of sight only without Remote ID enabled. 

Besides the obvious impact on safety and security, Remote ID will be particularly important for drones that have a significant amount of autonomy. According to the FAA, Remote ID is critical to enabling advanced autonomous operations—like routine flights beyond visual-line-of-sight—by providing airspace awareness .

Executive summaries are here and here, and the full rules are available through the FAA’s website here.

Toyota’s Gill Pratt on enhancing independence in old age

By 2050, the global population aged 65 or more will be nearly double what it is today. The number of people over the age of 80 will triple, approaching half a billion. Supporting an aging population is a worldwide concern, but this demographic shift is especially pronounced in Japan, where more than a third of Japanese will be 65 or older by midcentury.

Toyota Research Institute (TRI), which was established by Toyota Motor Corp. in 2015 to explore autonomous cars, robotics, and “human amplification technologies,” has also been focusing a significant portion of its research on ways to help older people maintain their health, happiness, and independence as long as possible. While an important goal in itself, improving self-sufficiency for the elderly also reduces the amount of support they need from society more broadly. And without technological help, sustaining this population in an effective and dignified manner will grow increasingly difficult—first in Japan, but globally soon after.

Gill Pratt, Toyota’s Chief Scientist and the CEO of TRI, believes that robots have a significant role to play in assisting older people by solving physical problems as well as providing mental and emotional support. With a background in robotics research and five years as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, during which time he oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge in 2015, Pratt understands how difficult it can be to bring robots into the real world in a useful, responsible, and respectful way. In an interview earlier this year in Washington, D.C., with IEEE Spectrum’s Evan Ackerman, he said that the best approach to this problem is a human-centric one: “It’s not about the robot, it’s about people.”

What are the important problems that we can usefully and reliably solve with home robots in the relatively near term?

Gill Pratt: We are looking at the aging society as the No. 1 market driver of interest to us. Over the last few years, we’ve come to the realization that an aging society creates two problems. One is within the home for an older person who needs help, and the other is for the rest of society—for younger people who need to be more productive to support a greater number of older people. The dependency ratio is the fraction of the population that works relative to the fraction that does not. As an example, in Japan, in not too many years, it’s going to get pretty close to 1:1. And we haven’t seen that, ever.

Solving physical problems is the easier part of assisting an aging society. The bigger issue is actually loneliness. This doesn’t sound like a robotics thing, but it could be. Related to loneliness, the key issue is having purpose, and feeling that your life is still worthwhile.

What we want to do is build a time machine. Of course we can’t do that, that’s science fiction, but we want to be able to have a person say, “I wish I could be 10 years younger” and then have a robot effectively help them as much as possible to live that kind of life.

There are many different robotic approaches that could be useful to address the problems you’re describing. Where do you begin?

Pratt: Let me start with an example, and this is one we talk about all of the time because it helps us think: Imagine that we built a robot to help with cooking. Older people often have difficulty with cooking, right?

Well, one robotic idea is to just cook meals for the person. This idea can be tempting, because what could be better than a machine that does all the cooking? Most roboticists are young, and most roboticists have all these interesting, exciting, technical things to focus on. And they think, “Wouldn’t it be great if some machine made my meals for me and brought me food so I could get back to work?”

But for an older person, what they would truly find meaningful is still being able to cook, and still being able to have the sincere feeling of “I can still do this myself.” It’s the time-machine idea—helping them to feel that they can still do what they used to be able to do and still cook for their family and contribute to their well-being. So we’re trying to figure out right now how to build machines that have that effect—that help you to cook but don’t cook for you, because those are two different things.

A robot for your home may not look much like this research platform, but it’s how TRI is learning to make home robots that are useful and safe. Tidying and cleaning are physically repetitive tasks that are ideal for home robots, but still a challenge since every home is different, and every person expects their home to be organized and cleaned differently.Toyota Research Institute

How can we manage this temptation to focus on solving technical problems rather than more impactful ones?

Pratt: What we have learned is that you start with the human being, the user, and you say, “What do they need?” And even though all of us love gadgets and robots and motors and amplifiers and hands and arms and legs and stuff, just put that on the shelf for a moment and say: “Okay. I want to imagine that I’m a grandparent. I’m retired. It’s not quite as easy to get around as when I was younger. And mostly I’m alone.” How do we help that person have a truly better quality of life? And out of that will occasionally come places where robotic technology can help tremendously.

A second point of advice is to try not to look for your keys where the light is. There’s an old adage about a person who drops their keys on the street at night, and so they go look for them under a streetlight, rather than the place they dropped them. We have an unfortunate tendency in the robotics field—and I’ve done it too—to say, “Oh, I know some mathematics that I can use to solve this problem over here.” That’s where the light is. But unfortunately, the problem that actually needs to get solved is over there, in the dark. It’s important to resist the temptation to use robotics as a vehicle for only solving problems that are tractable.

It sounds like social robots could potentially address some of these needs. What do you think is the right role for social robots for elder care?

Pratt: For people who have advanced dementia, things can be really, really tough. There are a variety of robotic-like things or doll-like things that can help a person with dementia feel much more at ease and genuinely improve the quality of their life. They sometimes feel creepy to people who don’t have that disability, but I believe that they’re actually quite good, and that they can serve that role well.

There’s another huge part of the market, if you want to think about it in business terms, where many people’s lives can be tremendously improved even when they’re simply retired. Perhaps their spouse has died, they don’t have much to do, and they're lonely and depressed. Typically, many of them are not technologically adept the way that their kids or their grandkids are. And the truth is their kids and their grandkids are busy. And so what can we really do to help?

Here there’s a very interesting dilemma, which is that we want to build a social-assistive technology, but we don’t want to pretend that the robot is a person. We’ve found that people will anthropomorphize a social machine, which shouldn’t be a surprise, but it’s very important to not cross a line where we are actively trying to promote the idea that this machine is actually real—that it’s a human being, or like a human being.

So there are a whole lot of things that we can do. The field is just beginning, and much of the improvement to people's lives can happen within the next 5 to 10 years. In the social robotics space, we can use robots to help connect lonely people with their kids, their grandkids, and their friends. We think this is a huge, untapped potential.

A robot for your home may not look much like this research platform, but it’s how TRI is learning to make home robots that are useful and safe. Perceiving and grasping transparent objects like drinking glasses is a particularly difficult task.Toyota Research Institute

Where do you draw the line with the amount of connection that you try to make between a human and a machine?

Pratt: We don’t want to trick anybody. We should be very ethically stringent, I think, to not try to fool anyone. People will fool themselves plenty—we don't have to do it for them.

To whatever extent that we can say, “This is your mechanized personal assistant,” that’s okay. It’s a machine, and it’s here to help you in a personalized way. It will learn what you like. It will learn what you don’t like. It will help you by reminding you to exercise, to call your kids, to call your friends, to get in touch with the doctor, all of those things that it's easy for people to miss on their own. With these sorts of socially assistive technologies, that’s the way to think of it. It’s not taking the place of other people. It’s helping you to be more connected with other people, and to live a healthier life because of that.

How much do you think humans should be in the loop with consumer robotic systems? Where might it be most useful?

Pratt: We should be reluctant to do person-behind-the-curtain stuff, although from a business point of view, we absolutely are going to need that. For example, say there's a human in an automated vehicle that comes to a double-parked car, and the automated vehicle doesn’t want to go around by crossing the double yellow line. Of course the vehicle should phone home and say, “I need an exception to cross the double yellow line.” A human being, for all kinds of reasons, should be the one to decide whether it’s okay to do the human part of driving, which is to make an exception and not follow the rules in this particular case.

However, having the human actually drive the car from a distance assumes that the communication link between the two of them is so reliable it’s as if the person is in the driver’s seat. Or, it assumes that the competence of the car to avoid a crash is so good that even if that communications link went down, the car would never crash. And those are both very, very hard things to do. So human beings that are remote, that perform a supervisory function, that’s fine. But I think that we have to be careful not to fool the public by making them think that nobody is in that front seat of the car, when there’s still a human driving—we’ve just moved that person to a place you can’t see.

In the robotics field, many people have spoken about this idea that we’ll have a machine to clean our house operated by a person in some part of the world where it would be good to create jobs. I think pragmatically it’s actually difficult to do this. And I would hope that the kinds of jobs we create are better than sitting at a desk and guiding a cleaning machine in someone’s house halfway around the world. It’s certainly not as physically taxing as having to be there and do the work, but I would hope that the cleaning robot would be good enough to clean the house by itself almost all the time and just occasionally when it’s stuck say, “Oh, I’m stuck, and I’m not sure what to do.” And then the human can help. The reason we want this technology is to improve quality of life, including for the people who are the supervisors of the machine. I don’t want to just shift work from one place to the other.

These bubble grippers are soft to the touch, making them safe for humans to interact with, but they also include the necessary sensing to be able to grasp and identify a wide variety of objects.Toyota Research Institute

Can you give an example of a specific technology that TRI is working on that could benefit the elderly?

Pratt: There are many examples. Let me pick one that is very tangible: the Punyo project.

In order to truly help elderly people live as if they are younger, robots not only need to be safe, they also need to be strong and gentle, able to sense and react to both expected and unexpected contacts and disturbances the way a human would. And of course, if robots are to make a difference in quality of life for many people, they must also be affordable.

Compliant actuation, where the robot senses physical contact and reacts with flexibility, can get us part way there. To get the rest of the way, we have developed instrumented, functional, low-cost compliant surfaces that are soft to the touch. We started with bubble grippers that have high-resolution tactile sensing for hands, and we are now adding compliant surfaces to all other parts of the robot's body to replace rigid metal or plastic. Our hope is to enable robot hardware to have the strength, gentleness, and physical awareness of the most able human assistant, and to be affordable by large numbers of elderly or disabled people.

What do you think the next DARPA challenge for robotics should be?

Pratt: Wow. I don’t know! But I can tell you what ours is [at TRI]. We have a challenge that we give ourselves right now in the grocery store. This doesn't mean we want to build a machine that does grocery shopping, but we think that trying to handle all of the difficult things that go on when you’re in the grocery store—picking things up even though there’s something right next to it, figuring out what the thing is even if the label that’s on it is half torn, putting it in the basket—this is a challenge task that will develop the same kind of capabilities we need for many other things within the home. We were looking for a task that didn’t require us to ask for 1,000 people to let us into their homes, and it turns out that the grocery store is a pretty good one. We have a hard time helping people to understand that it’s not about the store, it’s actually about the capabilities that let you work in the store, and that we believe will translate to a whole bunch of other things. So that’s the sort of stuff that we're doing work on.

As you’ve gone through your career from academia to DARPA and now TRI, how has your perspective on robotics changed?

Pratt: I think I’ve learned that lesson that I was telling you about before—I understand much more now that it’s not about the robot, it’s about people. And ultimately, taking this user-centered design point of view is easy to talk about, but it’s really hard to do.

As technologists, the reason we went into this field is that we love technology. I can sit and design things on a piece of paper and feel great about it, and yet I’m never thinking about who it is actually going to be for, and what am I trying to solve. So that’s a form of looking for your keys where the light is.

The hard thing to do is to search where it’s dark, and where it doesn’t feel so good, and where you actually say, “Let me first of all talk to a lot of people who are going to be the users of this product and understand what their needs are. Let me not fall into the trap of asking them what they want and trying to build that because that’s not the right answer.” So what I’ve learned most of all is the need to put myself in the user’s shoes, and to really think about it from that point of view.