In spring 2021, the FAA gave American Robotics (NASDAQ: ONDS), a Massachusetts-based company, permission to fly its industrial commercial “Scout” drone autonomously, requiring no human pilot interface or line of sight observation from the ground.
This was the first such approval from the FAA and forms one indication of how the future of industrial work might look without pilots. The operation would foreseeably allow railroad, pipeline, farming, and mining companies to monitor their assets remotely, with no compromise to human operator safety.
