By Matthew Jack
In recent years, drones have made headlines for their increasing appeal to hobbyists and professionals alike. As technology advances, so does the autonomy of unmanned aircraft and the range of applications they can serve.
The University of Iowa Operator Performance Laboratory, directed by Associate Professor Thomas Schnell, researches the ways drones will be controlled in the future — when the presence of a human operator is not always guaranteed.
“There are drones already that are fully autonomous, so the question that we try to answer is: when can they be fully integrated in the national airspace,” Schnell said.
The lab partners with Rockwell Collins, a Cedar Rapids-based avionics manufacturer, to design technology to ensure drones can make decisions in their environment in a way that will not cause damage to itself or its surroundings.
“They’ve been really great at helping us pinpoint solutions,” said Mathew Cover, a UI graduate student serving at the lab as a project engineer. “Our lab has a really cool relationship with them in that we’re one of the few places in the country that allows even undergraduates to work on this stuff.”
Rockwell Collins provides professional-grade hardware to the lab that allows the researchers to test drone software in a diverse range of conditions, including circumstances where the aircraft loses radio contact with its operator.
“We’re not relying on that test radio for controls of the [drone],” Schnell said. “We’re using it as an extra payload and we assess the performance.”
Regarding the timeframe of fully integrated autonomous drones in the air, both Schnell and Cover agree there is “close to a decade” of progress to be made.
“The technology is almost ready today, but you need to get all the legal ramifications and get people ready to accept that [drones] are going to be a part of U.S. airspace,” said Cover.
He said the first phase in their research is spent perfecting the link from the drone to the controller and making sure the operator can receive data about the aircraft.
The second phase, beginning “probably next year,” will involve making sure data can be sent back from the operator to the drone, using the professional-grade hardware provided by Rockwell Collins.
Finally, the drone must be able to make decisions without an operator present, “which is where you get into some exciting things with autonomy and ‘see and avoid’ technology,” Cover said — referring to the drone’s ability to broadcast its own location as well as determine the location of other aircraft in its vicinity.
“This will be happening probably in the next two to three years,” he said.
The applications of autonomous drones are nearly endless, from “the insurance industry being able to look at properties that were damaged” to “railroads looking down the tracks for obstructions,” Schnell said.
Some applications, like law enforcement and counterterrorism, “would be very clear immediate applications which may not need full integration into the national airspace.”
Cover says the bulk of the process is “not as exciting as you would imagine,” collecting permits and paperwork to perform tests.
Once cleared, however, “we start getting into the exciting things, where the engineering really starts happening,” he said.
