The FAA has just illuminated this drone to fly autonomously without a human being nearby

In October, the FAA took a big step forward to let increasingly intelligent drones fly, leaving Skydio’s autonomous drones to inspect any bridge in North Carolina for four years, provided humans had to ‘first checked that these bridges were clear.

Now the US airspace regulator is taking an even bigger step: American Robotics claims to have become the first company allowed to operate drones without the need for a human pilot or observer near the aircraft.

It’s not enough as important as you would expect from the company press release or The Wall Street JournalThe FAA’s headline “FAA Approves First Fully Automated Commercial Drone Flights” Because Humans Still Have To Be A Part Of The Equation: FAA Documents Show American Robotics Will Still Have To Assign A Human To Each Flight, who will perform a pre-take-off safety checklist and inspect the aircraft with remote tools. They are not yet fully automated.

But after that, the company’s Scout drone-in-a-box will take over and pilot the mission – and automatically shut down if necessary. The Scout’s box includes an acoustic detection system that allows the drone to detect and avoid other planes, which can spot one more than two miles away and automatically force the drone to descend, according to the company.

Photo by American Robotics

The FAA also only approves this waiver for a handful of specific locations in Kansas, Massachusetts, and Nevada that are owned by the company or its customers, so it’s not like they’re hovering over people and not knowing it. no more.

As you can see in the company’s video for the Scout System, it targets this technology on companies that want push-button aerial inspections of their own property – not exactly drone deliveries. For this, the FAA has a separate type of certification. But the FAA seems interested in what it can learn by letting American Robotics fly without humans physically nearby, as it explains in its rationale for the waiver:

The operations proposed by American Robotics will provide the FAA with critical data to use in evaluating BVLOS operations from offsite locations. When adopted on a larger scale, such a program could bring efficiency gains to many industries that power our economy, such as agriculture, transportation, mining, technology and unsustainable manufacturing.

American Robotics previously had an FAA Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) waiver, but this waiver (PDF) required its pilots to be physically at a location for pre-flight inspections.