Drones, civil liberties, lost dogs and pizza delivery

Frank Cerabino

Friday, July 6, 2012 | 2:02 a.m.

I was telling my wife the other day how convenient it would be if we had our own unmanned drone aircraft.

“We could use it to find Ruby,” I explained, referring to our dachshund, who occasionally likes to wander away, leaving us to walk down the street, clapping our hands like idiots while shouting the dog’s name.

“Instead, we could just launch the drone,” I said. “And then just fly it around the neighborhood, as its high definition camera relays images to our home computer. And while we’re at it, we could also see which neighbors are having a backyard barbecue.”

I had no idea at the time that my drone fantasy was being addressed by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, a Virginia-based trade group for drone aircraft manufacturers. This week, the association released the industry’s first code of conduct, a move aimed to reassure privacy advocates that the association was also interested in “safe, non-intrusive operation” of unmanned drones.

I guess this is a sign that drones will be in our future.

The drone industry’s lobbyists have successfully convinced the U.S. Congress this year to compel the FAA to carve out a spot in America’s civilian airspace for these unmanned aircraft by 2015. This would mean that domestic police departments and other government agencies, as well as private commercial enterprises, could become new customers for a drone manufacturing market that is expected to nearly double the next decade into an $11 billion-a-year industry.

“You will see a whole host of new industries arise that can use this technology,” Ben Gielow, government relations manager for the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, told me.

Drones have already been used, through special permits, by domestic law enforcement. The Miami Police Department has been permitted to use two 18-pound drones to fly over uninhabited areas of the Everglades. Drones have also been deployed along the Mexican border.

And the city of Tampa’s initial security plan for this summer’s Republican National Convention included the use of two “unmanned aerial vehicles.” The city later removed the drones from its surveillance plan.

As the technology improves, drones will get cheaper, more versatile and smaller. A few years ago, a small drone was an unmanned aircraft that weighed only 4 pounds, was small enough to fit in a backpack, and could be hand-launched and flown for 80 minutes up to a ceiling of 15,000 feet.

The next generation of surveillance drones in development, known as “Robobugs,” are only about 6 inches long. The American Civil Liberties Union is wary of seeing this technology morph from international military use to domestic surveillance applications.

“The prospect of cheap, small portable flying video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions, and abusive use of these tools in a way that could eventually eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities,” an ACLU report on drones said.

Gielow focused on the more beneficial aspects of the new technology, such as how drones could be used to inspect dangerous bridges, fight remote forest fires and help farmers as a tool to appraise the condition of their land.

“He could find the trouble spots, which would mean he wouldn’t have to crop dust his whole field,” Gielow said. “This would be both cost effective and good for the environment.”

But all high-brow inventions eventually find the most trivial of uses. Take the Internet for example. It started out as a way for the world’s best scientists to share their research, and it has ended up as a way for teenagers to record their ever-changing mood swings.

And that’s the way it will probably be with drones. They started out as an efficient way to kill al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, and they’ll probably end up flying a pizza to your door, checking for parking spots at the mall, or finding your wandering dachshund.

Frank Cerabino writes for the Palm Beach Post in Florida.