The applications of a national infrastructure of drones are numerous. From supporting supply chains and public works maintenance to minimizing damage from natural disasters, non-military drones have the potential to revolutionize our productive capacity. For this potential to become a reality, however, U.S. policy and scientific funding must align with the developments of drone computing over the next decade.
To that end, the Computing Community Consortium’s (CCC) newest report, Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing, lays out recommendations for maximizing the potential of drone computing. The findings are informed by the December 2025 Computing on the Fly workshop, which convened experts across computing research, industry, and government to craft an informed and realistic, yet visionary, roadmap for ensuring future U.S. leadership in this competitive field.
Recommendations for Funders of Scientific Research
Near-peer competitors are out-investing the U.S. in autonomous systems’ integration, threatening American leadership in a foundational technology advancement. Cross-agency coordination is essential to maintain American leadership in this area.
In practice, this coordination looks like the National Science Foundation (NSF) leading foundational research while mission agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Transportation (DoT), Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Department of Defense (DoD) ensure applications address real-world constraints and national priorities.
Equally critical is establishing a national testbed consortium enabling reproducible research across diverse platforms and environments, ideally serving 20 universities and 100+ industry partners. And further, it is necessary to specifically fund integration platforms that compose AI agents into safety-critical systems.
Recommendations for Policymakers
For non-military drones to realize their full potential, policy frameworks must be proactive rather than reactive to the rapidly evolving technology. It is essential to adopt these reactive frameworks across operator licensing and training, vehicle certification and maintenance, and traffic management, spectrum allocation, and airspace design.
At the same time, regulatory sandboxes are important for establishing safe experimentation frameworks. It is only through such experimentation that drones can enable solutions addressing issues like the $150B annual weather disaster burden while maintaining public safety. These regulatory sandboxes can accelerate innovation while managing risk.
Most fundamentally, however, regulatory environments must be conducive to drone production and operation at scale. Initial stakeholder sessions detailing the current bottlenecks and barriers could inform critical decisions in the coming years.
Finally, international coordination is key to ensuring U.S. leadership in this strategic domain. Policy harmonization with allies prevents market fragmentation while maintaining security advantages over adversaries.
Read the Full Report
The full report, including in-depth explanations and rationale for these recommendations, is available below. We highly recommend reading it, and subscribing below for CCC’s upcoming Key Recommendations Brief on this topic.
Read the Report Here
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This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) under Award Nos. 1734706 and 2300842. This award supports the Computing Community Consortium (CCC), a programmatic committee of the Computing Research Association (CRA). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
