Regulation of privately-owned drones is in ‘chaos’, says expert, after warnings ignored

REGULATION OF privately owned drones is in a state of “chaos” as authorities belatedly wake up to the impact of the flying gadgets, according to a leading UK robotics expert.

Professor Noel Sharkey said he warned about the risks associated with rapidly growing numbers of drones in 2007, but few listened.

Now the “genie was out of the bottle” and the technology was taking off with little being done to contain it, he said. Asked about the state of drone regulation at a news briefing in London, Prof Sharkey said: “Personally, I would say it’s in chaos. It’s somehow caught everybody by surprise – I don’t know how it did that. I was certainly complaining about it in 2007.

“I’m not a futurologist and I never look far in the future, I look at current technology. To me, it didn’t take any kind of deep thinking to realise what was going to happen with this at all.”

Prof Sharkey, from the University of Sheffield, is the co-author of a new report on drones from the Foundation for Responsible Robotics, a not-for-profit organisation he helped set up.

He said it was impossible to estimate how many privately operated drones there were in the UK, but the number probably ran into the “hundreds of thousands”.

Most are small devices powerful enough to carry a smartphone into the air, but still capable of reaching 500 feet. Worldwide, sales of drones reached a peak of 13.1bn US dollars (£9.69bn) in 2016.

Instances of near misses with aircraft and drugs being airlifted into prisons are well known. But the report’s authors also cited cases of ghoulish “disaster tourism” with drones recording video of unfolding tragedy on the ground, drones impeding helicopters in relief operations, drones being used to gain free access to sporting events and concerts, and even the police finding themselves being spied on as they investigated crimes.

“The police tell me that whenever they go to a crime scene now, very frequently they find a drone overhead,” said Prof Sharkey. “They’ve no idea who owns it, is it the criminal, is it someone else?”

New UK laws brought in just last month impose a ban on flying drones above 400ft and within one kilometre (0.6 mile) of airport boundaries.