The Future of Drones and their Public Acceptance

Abstract

Any emergent technology in history has raised an initial rejection by part of the society. Added to the several problems that the non-mature technology may have, the lack of any previous experience about side effects and the humans psychological fear to the unknown play an important influence in its acceptance. As drones bring up high social and economic expectations due to their capabilities and bussiness applications, the social acceptance is key to the complete development of drone technology's potential. Experts believe that social acceptance is ruled by a balance between beneficial usages and inconvenient issues regarding the technology. This balance in the aeronautical sector is also conditioned by the strict safety policies and regulations of the airspace and the current airspace users. To analyse this balance situation in actual and future environments, regarding drone technology, different use cases will be presented. These use cases have been proposed and analysed by different stakeholders from the U-space community network (UCN), a network of airspace and drone stakeholders who participated in the context of the SESAR CORUS project.The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of these use cases by obtaining responses from different stakeholders point of view using a survey in order to see how economical, safety and political aspects are balanced in each one of the cases. From the survey responses we will perform an analysis by means of three different acceptance indicators, one for each aspect commented.Main results and conclusions point out that the economical indicator is, in general, positive, especially for the low cost payload use cases. In contrast the economic indicator is close to neutral for city transport and airports use cases, which leads to propose some economic promotion action may be needed to make them a reality. For the safety indicator we observe that they are close to negative values as use case complexity increases. Thus we can conclude that some of the proposed missions start affecting the current levels of safety. Finally, the political indicator is mostly neutral, with some positive trends for scenarios related with inspection tasks or done in non-populated areas.

Retracted: Artificial intelligence for public perception of drones as a tool for telecommunication technologies

“…With the tendency to increase the existence of drones and their usage, because they are cheap and easy to use, several conditions and contents need to be legislated. 25 As the authors 27 state the difficulty associated with new technology regarding public acceptance and raising concern of safety and privacy. Several use cases were presented to analyze the balance of social acceptance between the drone's usability and safety and privacy concerns.…”

“…As the authors 27 state the difficulty associated with new technology regarding public acceptance and raising concern of safety and privacy. Several use cases were presented to analyze the balance of social acceptance between the drone's usability and safety and privacy concerns.…”

Delivery Drones - Just a Hype? Towards Autonomous Air Mobility Services at Scale

“…Social Challenges Early on, social challenges associated with commercial drones received great attention by academia and multiple studies already analyzed the public perception of drones in the past (e.g., Eißfeldt and End, 2020;Miethe et al, 2020). In this process, researchers repeatedly argue that the acceptance of drones as a new emerging technology will have a major impact on the success of integration and scaling of commercial use (Macias et al, 2019;Rice et al, 2018). The German Aerospace Center conducted a survey in Germany in 2020 with 832 participants on the acceptance of drone deliveries and showed that 59% of the respondents disapprove drone delivery applications.…”

Public Acceptance of the Use of Drones for Logistics: The State of Play and Moving Towards More Informed Debate

“…Indeed, 'how to make drones more acceptable' underpins a number of the studies discussed above. Maclas et al [46] further highlight the need for inclusiveness and approaches that empower people to get involved in decision making and, as experts build understanding of systems of provision, there will be communication opportunities. While it is relatively easy to show people drones and their capabilities, it is less easy to show them how provision might look in terms of volume of drones, where they might fly, how high/low, how far away, how they might sound.…”