Academics tackle domestic ethics.

• Author: Parsons, Dan
• Position: Inside science + technology

When revolutionary new technologies like unmanned aircraft become commercially available, the tendency is to focus on all their wondrous potential uses instead of the ethical and public safety concerns the proliferation of such technologies create.

Whether human organ transplant or cloning, emerging technologies typically receive critical, multi-disciplinary scrutiny and oversight during development through academic study.

At the University of North Dakota, remotely piloted aircraft are receiving the same rigorous vetting from the UAS Research Compliance Committee, which is overseeing the Grand Forks County sheriff's department's use of unmanned aircraft in law enforcement and public safety activities, said member Barry Milavetz, associate vice president for research and economic development at UND.

"With any research on emerging technologies, the federal government wants to know that we are meeting certain criteria," he said. "Those are transparency, risk versus benefit analysis and adherence to local community standards."

Animal and genetic research are held to the same standards, he said. Aside from Milavetz, an organic chemist who works with recombinant DNA, the committee has in its ranks a historian, a professor of religion and philosophy, a rancher and a professor of social work.

William Semke, associate professor of engineering at UND, said some of the most powerful multi-spectral sensors can read footprints in a field long after the person who made them has fled. That sensitivity can be built into a camera that weighs less than a pound and be flown on small, homemade unmanned aircraft. That incredible capability must be reconciled with public concerns over privacy before the Federal Aviation Administration allows UAS in the national airspace in 2015.

Nationwide, there are a dozen law enforcement agencies using unmanned aircraft to carry out their duties. All have internal policies on the appropriate use of the machines. None, other than the Grand Forks sheriff's department, has such comprehensive third-party oversight of their activities.

Alan Frazier--an assistant professor of aviation at UND 's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, UAS pilot and Grand Forks deputy sheriff--oversees the department's UAS activities. The effort is a joint collaboration between the sheriff's office, the university and two unmanned aircraft manufacturers: Monrovia, Calif-based AeroVironment and Draganfly Innovations, based in Saskatoon...