[coderdude]

This is an interesting idea and some of the other commenters did a good job of fleshing it out a little, but IIRC it is illegal to operate a UAV in the US unless you can take manual control at any time and so long as the UAV is always within the "operator's" eyesight.

[zhivota]

It's actually even more difficult than that. I participated in a UAV project in Idaho, and we had to secure airspace for the UAV, prove that if radio comms went down, the UAV would immediately go into a death spiral (to prevent it continuing on to a populated area), have a fully licensed pilot to guide it when not in automated mode, and who knows how many other requirements.

At this point, the FAA is _very_ serious about UAV safety, IMHO with good reason. Even with our extremely safe controls, we had one UAV crash due to launcher failure, and another get stuck up in the air a long distance away due to a sudden thunderstorm that rolled into our area.