The Future of Drones and their Public Acceptance

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 economical 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, a network of airspace and drone stakeholders who participated in the context of the SESAR CORUS11All the work within this paper is UPC work and it may not be the view of all CORUS consortium members 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 economical indicator is close to neutral for city transport and airports use cases, which leads to propose some economical 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.