Popular hobby or threatening combat device: the public perception of so-called “drones” seems to be shaped primarily by these two areas of application. As flying film and photo devices, they are operated mainly by amateur pilots for fun. However, in the lower air levels these inhabit, they are getting company: more and more drones are put to professional, civilian use. And the latter, sophisticated airborne machines differ not only in shape, size and weight, but also require new regulations and safety considerations. The civilian use of modern drones could be helpful for example in medicine, agriculture, environmental protection or for sea rescue. But in order to achieve this goal not only technical but above all regulatory and infrastructural challenges must be addressed. After all, all of these aircraft – including hobby drones – are part of civil air traffic.
Uwe Klingauf is Professor of Flight Systems and Automatic Control at the Technical University of Darmstadt and has been working in the field of aeronautical systems engineering for many years. In this episode of Digitalgespräch, the expert on automated flight systems talks about the state of the art, exciting current trends and challenges for research and development. He explains which safety considerations accompany the introduction of drones in urban areas, which processes have to take place in this and which applications are most promising. With hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, Klingauf discusses new use cases for automated aircraft, aspects that will determine which developments will prevail – and what has become of the hype surrounding parcel drones and flying taxis.
Further information:
Link to the information page “Drone Flight” of the German air traffic control Deutsche Flugsicherung: https://www.dfs.de/homepage/en/drone-flight/
all episodes of Digitalgespräch
The podcast is in German. At the moment there is no English version or transcript available.
