Anti-drone-jacking Software, Courtesy of a DARPA Contractor
You know that crop-dusting drone you have dusting your crops? I bet that sucker could carry a couple of nasty objects too, and it’s neat that you can feed GPS waypoints into its nav interface to have it fly anywhere you want. It’s not the plot of a movie if Insitu Inc. gets this patent.
Citing some staggering statistics about the cost-effectiveness of drones (a chopper costs over $200/flight-hour to operate, a drone costs a buck seventy-nine), Figure 4 explains best what this technology does: checks and balances for any tampering with the components.
It appears that commercial drones will need to undergo “export control”, a seal of approval that the drone cannot be tampered with and modified for purposes other than what it was made to do.
The patent application also has some cool illustrations of drone launching and retrieval on a military scale. This is an important patent, since the Applicant makes drones for DARPA, and we’ll keep an eye on it to see if the claims are stripped down in Prosecution.
Here is Claim 1, which seems quite narrow in scope already:
A method, performed by a computing system of an unmanned aerial vehicle, for ensuring that the unmanned aerial vehicle complies with specified export control requirements throughout the operation of the unmanned aerial vehicle, the method comprising:
storing an indication of an initial specification of the unmanned aerial vehicle, the initial specification of the unmanned aerial vehicle specifying initial configuration information and an identification for each of a plurality of tamper-resistant trusted components of the unmanned aerial vehicle, wherein the initial configuration of the unmanned aerial vehicle is in compliance with the specified export control requirements and wherein at least one of the trusted components is configured to ensure that the range of the unmanned aerial vehicle does not exceed a predetermined distance;
in response to receiving a request to operate the unmanned aerial vehicle, for each of the plurality of trusted components of the unmanned aerial vehicle,
querying the trusted component for current configuration information, wherein communication with the trusted component is encrypted,
in response to determining that the trusted component is not present within the unmanned aerial vehicle, modifying the operation of the unmanned aerial vehicle, and
in response to determining that the configuration of the trusted component has been modified since the initial specification was stored, modifying the operation of the unmanned aerial vehicle;
in response to receiving a command from a control station, ignoring the received command in response to determining that the control station is not a trusted control station;
in response to determining that the unmanned aerial vehicle is at least a predetermined distance from a launch location, modifying the path of the unmanned aerial vehicle; and
in response to determining that communication between the unmanned aerial vehicle and a control station has been lost, modifying the path of the unmanned aerial vehicle.
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Title: “Controlled Range and Payload for Unmanned Vehicles, and Associated Systems and Methods”
US Patent Application Publication No: 20140379173
Filed (PCT): Nov 15, 2012
Published: December 25, 2014
