[MOTHERBOARD]
[BROOKLYN, NEW YORK]
Hey, it's Brian with Motherboard.
[BRIAN A. ANDERSON MOTHERBOARD] I've got one word for you: drones.
Now, you've probably heard a little bit about drones in the news lately.
These things fly all throughout the Middle East and the horn of Africa.
When they're not spying on suspected terrorists,
they're probably killing them with hellfire missiles.
But here's the thing, drones are coming to the States.
And they're actually already here.
They're being used to keep an eye on things, so they're not gonna kill you.
At least not yet.
Motherboard has been fascinated with drones for a while now.
But it seems there are some misconceptions about the age of unmanned aerial vehicles.
To try and clear the air just a little bit,
we're gonna head out and talk to some people who are building drones,
who are selling drones all over the world.
With any luck, we hope to fly some drones as well.
We have absolutely no idea what we're getting into.
[DRONE ON]
New York City.
Captured by a Swiss drone hobbyist.
As you're probably thinking,
yes, this is illegal as all hell.
And I'll be the first to say that doing this sort of thing
over the sight of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil?
Probably not the best idea.
The drone view that you've seen probably looks a bit more like this.
Or more accurately, this.
The grainy, pixelated birds eye views that unmanned aerial vehicles,
or UAVs, offer, have become wildly popular on the internet.
Maybe you've heard of the grim footage under it's nome de YouTube:
drone porn.
How did we arrive at the Robo Wars?
And where are they taking us?
To get an idea, we left our Brooklyn offices for Washington, D.C.,
to meet up with P.W. Singer,
one of the world's foremost experts on military robotics.
We are
[P.W. SINGER AUTHOR, "WIRED FOR WAR"] wrestling with what it means to
live, work and even fight through a robotics revolution.
The technology that we're using with things like the Predator or the PackBot,
you know, those are Model T4, those are Wright Brothers equivalents.
But even with that first generation,
we're seeing impact on questions like,
how do we catch up our laws
in war?
But also how do we start to catch up our laws domestically
as we start to see that technology move over to the domestic side?
We're seeing an evolution that is following many other technologies.
The story of the airplane is, I think, a good illustration
of where we're at and the impact of war
on an industry that becomes a game changer.
The flying machine was once thought,
is mere science fiction.
Then, the Wright Brothers make it real.
Within a couple years, it's utilized in war.
In World War I at the start, they're not armed.
They're just used for observation.
Then they jury-rig arm there.
Then they start to specially design them to be armed.
And then by the end of World War I, you see all these other roles
being visualized for planes
that soon move over to the commercial sector.
Passenger, postal delivery, medical evacuation, you name it.
Same exact thing is happening with robotics.
You know um, first, science fiction.
Then, becomes real.
The Predator was originally unarmed,
just used for observation.
Then they jury-rig arm it.
Then they specially designed them to be armed.
Now, we're seeing all sorts of other roles.
One of the latest developments in militarized drones is autonomy.
Being able to tell your drone where to go,
and then basically setting the thing on cruise control until it gets there
is a game changer.
At the same time,
drone technology is doing what most any other killer ad does as it proliferates.
It's becoming smaller.
We actually noticed this evolution last year when VICE was in Amman, Jordan,
home to SOFEX,
the world's largest military weapons expo.
You know when you were a kid you used to have those
[SHANE SMITH VICE] little model airplanes and then be like...
You know, somebody's dad would be a real nerd and have the model airplane.
Now like, it's all model airplane-style drones
that can take pictures or drop bombs.
We want to check out some of these micro drones and size up their market.
So we decided to go back.
[SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES EXPOSITION 2012 AMMAN, JORDAN]
Drones are becoming hot commodities for armed forces around the world.
Some 600 companies from well over 50 countries are dabbling with drone tech
for both spying and killing.
And nowhere is this more evident than among the trade booths at SOFEX,
where we first meet this guy,
a rep for a Turkish drone company.
My name is Fatih Senkul,
[FATIH SENKUL ATLANTIS UVS] I'm working for Atlantis Unmanned Vehicle Solutions
developing unmanned vehicles like "Aeroseeker."
Some photographers want to use it for surveillance purposes,
military issues, and maybe some go track-and-seek missions.
Some of the militaries, even the Turkish Army [said], "What's the payload?"
They asked, we said "500 grams"
"So let's put a very little camera,
and just put 500 grams of bomb
and they will do a suicide attack."
That's one of the issues they offered that we hadn't thought of.
This is something that the military is thinking.
If that sounds crazy, well,
then there's this.
I am a fan of Terminator
and I love these movies.
I really would like to see some of them in the future,
like 2030 maybe?
So,
I'm trying to do my best to see them.
Unlike Fatih,
I'm in no rush to hasten the rise of the machines.
The next guy we meet at SOFEX maybe isn't either.
Then, he says something almost as crazy.
To me, drone means you've got something that's operational on its own,
[CHRIS BARTER DATRON] it's kind of doing its own thing, like a HAL out of a
'2001: Space Odyssey.'
Here's hoping his robot, The Scout,
has no intentions of becoming self-aware like HAL
and refusing to open the pod-bay doors.
[COST $60,000 USD]
Now, to be clear,
The Scout is built by Aeryon Labs,
a Canadian drone firm.
Datron, its reps like Chris,
work with Aeryon on the supply side of the chain.
Chris Barter's a drone dealer.
The Scout is the flagship UAV in Datron's suite of tactical robotics.
Take one look at its size, and it's pretty clear
that The Scout is nothing more than a surveillance system.
It can fly at speeds up to 30 miles per hour.
It's fully operational from -22 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
And it can withstand wind gusts up to 50 miles per hour.
It's a compact, capable machine
and has been sought after by the likes of NOA,
the US Coast Guard and FEMA.
Is there anything that,
you know, that you can give me,
like a brochure or something like that?
And hopefully we will be contacting you very very soon.
Sounds like a plan.
After Chris closes the deal,
he invites us back to Datron's headquarters,
just outside of San Diego.
In addition to drones, he promises
there's going to be some pretty decent surfing.
I'm a pretty Buddhist guy.
There's not much that makes me tick out there.
Um, outside of bad driving and bad surfing.
Would you ever use a Scout to shoot some pretty gnarly,
big wave surfing footage?
Oh absolutely, man.
That's actually one of my dreams is to take it out to Pipeline or Waimea.
So even though Chris exudes the calculating precision
of a drone capitalist,
he's a surfer dude at heart.
And maybe even a drone hobbyist.
And he isn't the only one who views drones as being
a whole lot more than killers and spies.
This is Justin Wellender.
Notice those goggles he's putting on.
Those allow for what's known as first person viewing.
So suddenly,
what the drone's camera sees, transmits back to Justin's goggles.
In effect, allowing him to fly.
But, we'll get back to the hobbyist later.
[DRONE VALLEY VISTA, CALIFORNIA]
Southern California has long been a hub of aerospace R and D.
And today, drone firms like Datron are popping up all over the region.
You can call it Drone Valley.
Or even the Drone Zone.
Datron's campus is in one of these cookie cutter industrial parks.
But soon enough, we find the place,
and we're greeted by Chris and two of his colleagues.
We get down to the brass tax.
Who buys a Scout?
I will not go into specific customers by name,
but I can address customer bases that we will go after.
[DATRON PROMO VIDEO] The Scout is man-packable and offers fast setup,
ease of use and hot, swappable payload capabilities.
The snap together assembly requires no tools
and total assembly to take-off time could be measured in seconds.
We're targeting the guy, be it the law enforcement officer,
be it the squad guy who's out in a combat theater,
who doesn't want to rely on some guy flying a system in Las Vegas
that's being launched out of an airport that's, you know, 7,000 miles away.
Unlike the Scout, most so-called "hunter-killer drones"
are flown out of airforce bases throughout the American West.
Many people lose sleep over the thought of these hulking drones.
But many others accept the new bug-splat warfare.
I have no qualms when I read the news about a drone strike in Pakistan.
What troubles me is that
people have a tendency to kind of lump in a lot of these unmanned systems
one with another.
So a Scout, which is unarmed and will probably always be unarmed,
is meant specifically for surveillance.
Will never be harming any individual.
For the most part, unless you know, any kind of accident.
The unit really and truly flies itself.
It just waits first to tell it when to take off, how high to go,
[PAUL WILSON DATRON] how fast to fly, where we want it to go and what to look at.
All of our status says we're okay, we've got a GPS accuracy of 2.6 meters.
So we're ready to take off.
It spins up,
it says I've done all my check so now I'm ready to take off.
So I hit take off.
The vehicle is very good at flying itself
and it just listens to the directions of how high we want it to go,
where we want it to go to and what we want it to look at.
We've had a lot of interest in special use cases
like in Nome, Alaska, where they actually had an oil tanker trended,
ship oil into Nome.
Unfortunately, the harbor froze really early in the year.
What they actually did with the Scout was they took it off
and they took photographs of the ice surrounding this harbor.
And in a post-processing, um...
Using post-processing software, they were able to actually
map out the sea ice thickness.
So they could navigate this tanker in accordingly.
So it's a pretty diverse system.
It takes some convincing,
but eventually Chris and his team let us take this diverse system of theirs
for a spin.
So I'm gazing up at this airborne robot.
Only to see it looking back down at me.
I begin to feel the sting of my own privacy potentially being compromised.
And I can't help but wonder if Chris and Datron feel the same.
Yes, we do empathize with the security and privacy rights,
but we're more so focused on supporting that agency,
supporting that firefighter or supporting that law enforcement officer
going into the building,
who needs to know either what's happening in that building
in a tactical type of situation or what's happening on the other side.
So really, it's in the court of public opinion how that gets fleshed out.
Datron doesn't want to talk about privacy.
But Chris hopes every day civilians will come to see something like the Scout
as a friend, not Big Brother.
As we deploy these into real world environments,
what I hope happens is that people attain an understanding
of how these systems are actually working for them.
As opposed to against them.
How do you think we did?
You guys did pretty good.
You took off and you landed exactly where you wanted it to
and you didn't crash a thing.
You did good. -No blood.
No blood!
No blood, no dents, no scratches!
Now that we've gotten a glimpse of the defense and professional side of this equation,
we decided to check out some of the folks
at the leading edge of hobby drones.
A few miles down the road from Datron is 3D Robotics,
a company that represents a drastic culture shift in drone tech.
Alan and Sam, two engineers with the company,
give us a quick run of the lab.
This is where we design all the
[ALAN SANCHEZ 3D ROBOTICS] frames, the autopilots,
all the circuits.
Right.
And also where we play around.
So this is just where everything starts
and then the manufacturing, shipping
and testing is on the other side.
So right now, the word "drone" I feel has a negative connotation,
especially with all the wars that have been going on and
military drones being the most common use of the word.
But really, a drone is a machine that you can,
you know, pre-program or class at a level of autonomy.
That could, you know, do a job the user can't do or doesn't want to do.
So what we're doing is turning regular RC Aircraft
or even, you know, helicopter squad copters into autonomous vehicles.
With our autopilot, you can just drop it into your existing vehicle
and turn it into a fully autonomous aircraft...
Um, something that wasn't available for the masses before.
Um, and then, what to do with it, that's where the user comes in, you know?
We're selling the tool and it's up to the user to come up with a use for it.
And you know, you can go buy scissors and do something bad with it,
so it's basically the same thing.
I'm Chris Anderson,
[CHRIS ANDERSON CO-FOUNDER 3D ROBOTICS] I'm the co-founder of 3D Robotics and
founded DIY drones in the community that spawned us initially.
This is not my day job.
My day job is I'm the editor at WIRED.
Shortly after taping this interview,
Chris Anderson announced his departure from WIRED
to focus on 3D Robotics full-time.
Well what you're looking at here is
what we think of something like, you know, the Apple, you know,
from 1977, coming out of the Home-brewed computing club.
Amateurs, um, hobbyists, you know, not the IBMs of the day.
Technology in your cell phone, the sensors, the processors,
the wireless, etc. The fact that this has become cheap and available
and ubiquitous is the enabling technology
of the personal drone movement.
And we don't come out of the airspace and disappear.
It'll come-it definitely won't come out of the military.
We come out of the hobbyist world,
and what you're seeing here is just a bottoms up,
open-sourced, community-based attempt
to take technology that was once a military, industrial one
and democratize it.
Make it available to everybody and introduce the word "personal" to drone.
Minutes later, we're heading to a nearby field
that serves as one of the main proving grounds for 3D's aircraft.
Alan and Sam bring along two drones:
a small quad copter and a more traditional RC glider.
We're curious to see how these guys stack up against the pro model,
like the Scout.
These things are light.
The planes are foam, they hit you on the head,
they'll just sort of bounce off. It won't hurt you
but they're not, they don't have weapons.
They are, you know, can't carry anything very heavy.
They're, you know, designed basically to like, radar patrol
like toy airplanes but they just have a plane.
Yeah, so these things take a while to get some altitude.
Bottled it up. Fill it up or should I just...
[COST $500 USD]
And just like that, our graceful flight is cut short.
The guys are spooked by a small private plane
passing through our airspace.
Which brings us to the Federal Aviation Administration's stance on drones.
You know, since the FAA doesn't really have rules for what we make,
we just piggyback onto RC Aircraft.
And so we're limited by, you know, altitude,
we can only fly 400 feet or below.
We have to fly within line of sight.
Just various rules that are there
that maybe we could do away with 'cause our drones are more capable.
[COST $600 USD]
While 3D's quad copter and the Scout might look similar,
their differences far outweigh any similarities.
3D shoots seemingly better looking footage
than the Scout that we flew, for one thing.
Just compare the two.
Then again, what the Scout might lack in visuals,
it makes up in durability.
And of course the GPS and the slick user interface
allow for reconnaissance and search and rescue capabilities
that put it above and beyond 3D's systems,
which are more or less, pimped out RC Aircraft.
We fly 3D's drones the old-fashioned way,
with RC controllers.
But thanks to 3D's autopilot, these are autonomous aircraft.
Meaning that just like the Scout,
you can tell your DIY drone where to go,
let it get there by itself,
and then regain control once it's at point B.
Wow.
I could see how it would be easy to drop out
and kick it in the drone zone forever,
but it's time we get back to New York.
So we've made it back to Brooklyn.
Before this trip, a lot of my thinking about today's drone world
came with a certain alarmism.
To a degree, I think it still does.
And for good reason.
When you're playing with toys like these, it can be hard to forget
that drone technologies are evolving in large part
to being really, really good at killing a lot of people.
So if you want it to come back to you, -Yeah.
take this switch and pull it all the way down.
So I think that rigging that big Predator and Reaper drones
to incinerate innocent civilians and American citizens on foreign soil,
is too much the stuff of war crimes and extrajudicial killings.
And I certainly don't sit well with the thought of a spying robot
peering into my apartment window.
But when it comes to some of the tactical and hobbyist drone deployments
that I saw in Jordan and San Diego,
I kind of caught the bug.
It's getting harder and harder to argue against the fact that for certain scenarios,
drones just make sense.
Think about Aeryon giving a couple Scouts to Libyan rebels last year
to help aid their fight against Muammar Qaddafi's forces.
We all know how that story ended.
But beyond the wartime theater,
think of the myriad possibilities that drones open up for research,
filmmaking,
even the next generation in taco delivery.
Or I think about a guy like Justin, who's just really, really stoked on flying.
My guess as to what the domestic dronescape is going to look like
in the next five to ten years is about as good as yours.
But having spoken with people like Chris Barter
and Sam and Alan out at 3D,
I can say with relative assurity that drones are going to become
more a part of our everyday lives than they already are.
Should we be concerned about that?
Absolutely.
But so long as these drones are being put to legitimate uses,
that's maybe not the worst thing, is it?