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In the March issue of Smithsonian Magazine, meet Dave Kroetsch and Pawel Lukasynski, two high school students from Kitchener, Ontario, who decided one day that they needed a "challenging" class project. Together they built an autonomous flyer in just nine months, entered it in the robotics competition and did surprisingly well. Like Dave and Pawel, the world's engineers are quickly working out the technologies that could make flying robots ubiquitous. And while the machines may be very difficult to build at this point, the key attraction is that they would be very easy to fly, requiring perhaps no more skill than a human command to fly from point A to point B.
As the technology develops, safety becomes a research theme. The FAA has not yet released regulations for flying robots. Other issues will ultimately need to be discussed. Will, for example, the Fourth Amendment permit continuous surveillance from the air? Join Fred Hapgood as he explores this technological frontier and the issues surrounding it.
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