Drones

EDUCAUSE LEARNING INITIATIVE | JANUARY 2015

Scenario

Spencer, a mechanical engineering major, is taking a seminar on robotic design. Last quarter, Spencer built an unmanned aerial vehicle, which he will test in a collaborative project this quarter. The instructor puts up a Facebook page where people from across campus propose projects for which a drone would be helpful. Spencer responds to a posting from Maddie, a graduate student in environmental engineering, who would like to use a drone to survey a 240-acre wetland on property the university owns. Her master’s thesis will evaluate the impact of a development the institution has proposed for the site, and using a drone for that survey will be far faster, safer, and less disruptive to the habitat than doing it on foot and by boat.

Spencer installs a video camera on the drone, along with several sensors to measure temperature and air quality. The next day, Spencer flies his quadcopter over the designated area while Maddie watches the video in real time. The drone sends images of power lines, neighboring traffic flows, and the lake that borders the site. The heat sensor detects several warm areas that suggest mammal or bird habitats, and the air quality sensors show a spike in carbon monoxide near the highway.

Spencer and Maddie return to the site three days later to fly the drone over a three-acre patch, solid with undergrowth. Data from the previous flight suggest 11 potential wildlife habitats there, a half-mile from the highway. Spencer equips the drone for close-up still photography, and the images they collect confirm the presence of nesting wood ducks, the very birds the wetlands were designated to protect. Use of the drone was essential to this because the waist-high undergrowth would make walking the area nearly impossible and the wood ducks would have disappeared at the first hint of human intrusion. Spencer gains valuable experience with his drone from the collaboration with Maddie, and she obtains the information she needs to not only complete her thesis but also hopefully persuade the university not to develop the area.

1 What is it?

Drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, are perhaps most widely recognized for their use in military and police activities. But these compact, remote-controlled devices are finding a growing number of uses in education and scholarly research, where they support remote viewing, landscape searches, site monitoring, and data gathering. A research botanist might use a drone to survey rare plant life on cliff outcroppings, or an instructor in city planning might use the tool to capture environmental data about the proposed inner-city site for a student-designed housing project.

2 How does it work?

Although some drones can be programmed to fly without the interaction of a human pilot, the majority are remote-controlled devices. Most often, these take the form of a small multicopter, ranging in size from some that would fit in the palm of a hand to others that weigh a couple of hundred pounds. They take off vertically and use their multiple rotors to move, balance, and hover. Drones run on rechargeable batteries, and ground control often consists of a radio-controlled unit with switches and buttons or a smartphone or tablet that presents a display with virtual controls. Drones might carry one or more cameras or sensors to record data that are subsequently sent to software on ground-based equipment such as a laptop or tablet.

3 Who’s doing it?

Researchers and instructors at numerous colleges and universities have been employing drones in experimental programs over the past few years. Students at Bergen Community College in New Jersey built drones to capture images for 3D maps of the campus. The University of Colorado at Boulder uses the technology to measure supercell thunderstorms to try to determine what causes them to produce tornadoes. At the UC Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, drones are employed experimentally for crop dusting. Kansas State University Salina has an Unmanned Aircraft Systems program where students can earn a bachelor’s degree studying the flight, maintenance, and engineering of drones. In Canada, drones are approved for use in such efforts as the journalism program at Langara College in Vancouver. There, aspiring reporters study the legal and ethical aspects of using drones for news coverage and are taught how to pilot drones for that purpose. In the United States, however, regulations are hazy. At the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, students were using unmanned aerial vehicles as a newsgathering tool, but their local drones were grounded by a cease-and-desist order from the FAA.

4 Why is it significant?

Because drones are frequently tied into a network, can be controlled by mobile devices, and could continuously upload images and sensor data to devices or online repositories, they can be seen as part of the growing Internet of Things. Drones provide a sandbox for studying the ways education can incorporate the rapidly exploding field of robotics into teaching and learning. Because they have become relatively inexpensive, they are cost-effective for field work, opening areas of study not previously available. Much of the effectiveness of drones has been made possible through more powerful and lighter cameras with stabilization units capable of taking high-resolution images from a flying platform. Better resolution allows users to create 3D maps or distinguish small changes in landscapes, on buildings, or in crowds. Miniaturization, too, has played a key role in that numerous kinds of sensors can accompany drones, measuring everything from changes in polar ice sheets to the chemical environment of a volcano. As a curious benefit of miniaturization, tools and components, such as mobile hotspots, GPS trackers, tiny cameras, or RFID tags, are lightweight enough to be delivered via drone to field work efforts.

5 What are the downsides?

Drone crashes can injure people, damage property, or cause other trouble due to inexpert handling or unforeseen problems. Because drones can easily go where humans cannot, they raise numerous ethical concerns regarding privacy and security. They also raise questions in research, notably whether a flying device will affect the animal and human life forms being observed. These and other issues have placed drones in unsettled legal terrain with an uncertain and changing regulatory climate. Until new rules go into effect, regulation in the United States specifies how drones can be flown but is ambiguous about who can fly them and for what purposes. Drones are legal for recreational purposes but cannot be flown higher than 400 feet, cannot be deployed too close to an airport, and cannot be used for commercial purposes without individual FAA approval. But what constitutes “commercial” activities is unclear, and it has at times been interpreted to mean any activity that is not recreational or part of a government program.

6 Where is it going?

Drones are certain to see increased use going forward because they provide a relatively inexpensive and effective platform to carry out a wide range of activities. On campus, Wi-Fi hotspots on drones could be sent to hover or perch at specified campus locations to provide or boost connectivity. With increased frequency, drones will be used for wilderness observation, traffic control, and farmland monitoring. Autonomous drones, which follow coded instructions for their routes and activity rather than depending on remote control, will find greater use in data gathering and observational activities, particularly where the same set of locations must be observed over time. As more of these devices fill the airspace over our heads, new FAA rules and regulations will emerge. Current new stories suggest that some operators might be required to have licenses. If the convoluted regulations that apply to drones are clarified and updated, many new opportunities could emerge for the use of drones in higher education, both for researchers and for faculty and students, who could use them in many kinds of learning activities.

7 What are the implications for teaching and learning?

The use of drones in research, classrooms, labs, and group projects is still new but gaining in popularity. These devices can support activities from the filming of student movies to the evaluation of crop conditions for agricultural studies. They support student mapping on campus and monitoring in a variety of academic fields. Drones offer new angles for digital storytelling and provide photographs of hard-to-reach areas for class, lab, and research activities in biology, botany, zoology, archeology, and wildlife behavior studies. These highly sophisticated machines are often built by students who program them to carry cameras and relay the images, or engage in remote sensing and sampling from areas not easily accessed. Where drones enable remote viewing, they offer us easy access to overhead views and new perspectives, literally changing the way we see the world around us.

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