(Bloomberg) — Google Inc., the company that brought order to theInternet, has set its sights on doing the same for the flocks ofcommercial drones expected to someday clog the skies.

The search-engine pioneer is joining some of the biggestcompanies in technology, communications and aviation — includingAmazon.com Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Harris Corp. — intrying to create an air-traffic control system to prevent mid-aircollisions.

But don't expect a big federally operated network of controltowers. The government hasn't said who will run the system or howit will operate, and is asking for ideas.

[Related: FAA complexity, but opportunity withdrones]

"We think the airspace side of this picture is really not aplace where any one entity or any one organization can think oftaking charge," Dave Vos, who heads Google's secretive ProjectWing, told Bloomberg News in his most expansive comments onGoogle's vision to date. "The idea being that it's not 'Google isgoing to go out and build a solution and everyone else has tosubscribe to it.' The idea really is anyone should be free to builda solution."

At least 14 companies, including Google, Amazon, Verizon andHarris, have signed agreements with NASA to help devise the firstair-traffic system to coordinate small, low-altitude drones, whichthe agency calls the Unmanned Aerial System Traffic Management.More than 100 other companies and universities have also expressedinterest in the project, which will be needed before commercialdrones can fly long distances to deliver goods, inspect power linesand survey crops.

NASA conference

Many will attend a NASA-sponsored conference next week on how itshould work. The goal is to eventually create a fully automatedrobotic ballet in the sky, with computers instructing drones tomove around obstructions and each other.

Whether the system will be privately or publicly run — or evenif it will be a single system — hasn't been decided.

To the winners will go a foothold in an emergingmultibillion-dollar economy of unmanned flying machines. That'shelped attract venture capital firms like Accel Partners, IntelCorp.'s investment arm and Millennium Technology ValuePartners.

"They definitely see it as an economic opportunity and assomething that they want to participate in," Brian Wynne, presidentof the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International,said. "This is real magic."

Vos said he foresees a day when thousands of drones, all withina few hundred feet of the ground, will routinely ply the skiesabove cities — reducing pollution by taking traffic off thestreets. That could easily dwarf traditional aircraft flights,which max out at 10,000 to 12,000 at a time over the U.S.

Computer networks

Google called competitors and government agencies to its ownconference in June to share its vision of air-traffic control. Thefoundation of any system must be the ability to trust that allparticipants will reliably identify themselves and their locations,Vos said. The airspace must be open to any drones willing to followthe rules.

Networks of computers on the ground and in the air will setroutes that avoid mid-air collisions. Humans will still be incharge, but unlike the current air-traffic system, controllers mustrely on computers to make the split-second decisions necessary tokeep drone traffic flowing and safe, he said.

Vos envisions a decentralized system with multiple privateoperators, most likely overseen by the Federal AviationAdministration.

Amazon has been tight-lipped about what it wants in a droneair-traffic system. Gur Kimchi, vice president of the company'sdrone delivery division, Amazon Prime Air, issued a statementsaying everyone in the industry "must work together." Kimchi, whowill deliver a key-note speech on July 28 at NASA's conference,said he would discuss more details then.

(Photo: Shutterstock)

Recent demonstration

PrecisionHawk, a Raleigh, North Carolina, drone company withabout 100 employees, began developing its own drone traffic controlsystem because the large agriculture and oil companies it flies forwanted something to keep tabs on unmanned flights. "Our clientsneed it," Tyler Collins, the program's director, said.

In a recent demonstration over a North Carolina cattle farm,Collins and his team intentionally steered a quad-copter dronetoward an imagined crop duster at work on an adjacent farm, thekind of hazardous scenario PrecisionHawk employees have seen in thereal world.

[Related: Drone industry taking off, thanks to insurers'willingness to write cover]

Within seconds an alert popped up on the operator's smartwatch:"WARNING, nearing no-fly zone." When the operator ignored thewarning, an autopilot took over and flew the whirring machine backto safety.

PrecisionHawk's system can automatically block its drones fromflying into danger, such as around airports and other aircraft. Andit makes a drone's real-time flight track available so others canstay away.

Skydio, Airware

Skydio Inc., a Menlo Park, California, company founded a yearago, is developing arrays of tiny cameras mounted on drones andlinked to computer chips that automatically guide them aroundtrees, power lines and other obstructions, Chief Executive OfficerAdam Bry said. San Francisco-based Airware and DroneDeploy arecreating computer networks capable of showing where drones areoperating.

After putting out word last year that NASA wanted help on itssmall-drone control system, 126 companies expressed interest, saidNASA's Parimal Kopardekar, the project manager.

"We think through collaboration we can collectively decide onthe right requirements faster," he said.

Kopardekar envisions a tiered system of tighter and tightercontrols as drone traffic ramps up. If a drone pilot wants to flyover a remote farm, all he or she might need to do is file a noticeto a centralized computer system. As unmanned flights becomedenser, the cloud-based system would need to track drones to ensurethey wouldn't collide, just as radar follows traditional aircraftnow, he said.

Drone detection

He's also contemplating drone-detection systems to ensure thatstealth unmanned aircraft (such as the one that landed on the WhiteHouse lawn Jan. 26) can be tracked. Kopardekar envisions turningover the design to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Just how all this will happen isn't yet known, let alone whowill pay for it or operate it. That has left a lot of room forjockeying among the players, according to Gary Church, president ofAviation Management Associates Inc., who has consulted ondrone-related projects for a decade.

Will drones be tracked by the same equipment the FAA has orderedtraditional aircraft to install by 2020, known as ADS-B? If so,Harris, which built FAA's ADS-B tracking system and is also workingwith NASA, stands to benefit.

Or will the nation's cellular network be adapted for dronemonitoring? That may be a boon for Verizon and other mobile phonecompanies.

Will fiercely independent recreational fliers, who are nowexempt from most drone regulations, be required to adhere to newrules? How will the system handle rogue operators who don'tcooperate?

"It's kind of a big problem statement, but we think it's quitetractable," Vos said of the challenge. As long as "we forceourselves to think collaboratively, we're pretty convinced that theanswers come out pretty clearly."