The most common questions are:
- If the system tells people where they cannot fly (privacy requests, no-fly zones), it’s easy to circumvent it by not using the service.
- Yes, but people will want to use the system for the benefits of avoiding damage or loss, or liability. It’s not meant to limit drones, but to protect them.
- Can’t you just specify where there are safe flying zones and corridors instead?
- A big benefit of a drone is that it can go in any direction, and is smaller than a piloted vehicle. If safe zones were provided, it would be more limiting than helpful, and not assist in deliveries, surveys and other uses of drones.
- You will be tracking my location, I don’t want that.
- The PROWL system can be accessed from anywhere, and look up any location. You could be physically in Australia and looking up information from Japan.
- The record of where you have requested a lookup to start from is not part of the hazard database, the position of a drone/user is not part of PROWL. Have a look at what it will not do.
- This already exists with some drone vendors
- Some drones have control for mandatory exclusion zones such as airports, but not every object and hazard in the world, and are not updated constantly.
- The information already exists in other sources
- Yes, but they don’t provide it in a way that is easily used for route planning. Without the PROWL system, you would need to look up airports and privacy requests and buildings and trees and schools/hospitals – and work out the combination of hazards for yourself.
- There are other providers such as Google, OpenStreetMap, Esri – which can be used as additional data sources to augment or validate information, but they do not have the information about no-fly zones, privacy requests, overhead power lines, temporary hazards such as construction cranes, etc. Only PROWL offers this.
- Can’t I just get all the data downloaded for me to keep on a database of my own?
- That would be out of date as soon as it is downloaded, not able to be improved by users from around the world, and not include the whole planet of data!
- GPS is not accurate enough
- It doesn’t need to be – the PROWL data helps in planning a route, and your chosen planning software can take into account any requirement for error acceptance. Your software is planning a route around hazards, trying to avoid them by as much distance as practical.
- GPS technology, augmented with accelerometer and motion detection, will improve GPS accuracy in the future.
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