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  • What I want to understand is the regulatory environment around all of this as well,

  • because the FAA has been doing a lot to help try and ensure drones coming in a safe and standardized way.

  • What are they doing in terms of potentially hurting humans?

  • Well, right now the FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration,

  • is trying to write the first basic rules that allow widespread flights over human beings, over crowds of people.

  • The rules are a little bit on the haul.

  • They are trying to figure out how to deal with security concerns,

  • like how does the police know whether a drone is legal to be over a crowd or not.

  • And it's also caught up in the Trump administration's go slow approach on new regulations,

  • but they are working feverishly to come up with these standards right now.

  • And in terms of how the researchers are helping aligning themselves to where the standard might be set.

  • I mean I can think of the big companies that want it.

  • If Amazon is gonna be delivering your football shirt to you in the crowd,

  • you're gonna need to be able to ensure that it's allowed.

  • What are the researchers doing to ensure that they don't hurt us?

  • Well the whole point of this research is, you know this is such a new industry,

  • people don't know what is gonna happen if in the worst case scenario.

  • You know when you have millions of these consumer drones being sold to people,

  • what happens if one falls out of the sky and hits a child in the head?

  • So what they are trying to do with these tests is to figure out what the parameters are,

  • and then once they do that, as we heard in the video, then they can start try to figure out mitigation,

  • put padding on, cover the propellers,

  • build a mat of materials that break apart so they don't hurt as much when they impact, etc.

  • That's really the point of the research right now.

  • Have there been any incident or accident that are hurting people this such or it's pretty minimal thus far ?

  • You know it's hard get the handle on the actual numbers,

  • but if you go out on YouTube and online there are really scores of cases.

  • There was a tragic story in the U.K. last year, or the year before, which a toddler lost an eye

  • You know, there are a lot of them out there.

What I want to understand is the regulatory environment around all of this as well,

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