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The Big Future of Unmanned Systems – By Kevin Wengler


Drones are taking over people! Your neighbor is thinking of buying one. Your professor has already collaborated with other researchers using biometrics and drones, and the police are just about to take your photo from 200 feet in the air; far enough away that you can’t hear the buzz of the remotely piloted aerial vehicle that looks like a scaled down helicopter with a compact multi-sensor turret under the front nose of the craft. At that height, you probably won’t see its presence in the air either. Swarms of these things covering every municipality across the state are keeping an eye on weather, traffic, pollution, incoming solar radiation, and people who do bad things. Like you! We are all bad people and we deserve to get caught by one of these flying robots. Newborns are playing video games that are basically training them how to operate any robot- remotely. Of course the robots they see are dressed up like Barney characters, so that they can desensitize any likeness to everyday things that adults do- like invading people’s privacy.

WHAT YOU JUST READ IS NOT WHAT I AM PRESCRIBING OR PREDICTING. It is, of course, a fantasy that helps illustrate some of the fears that accompany current waves of opinion and accusations regarding drones.

About a year ago, I was catching sensational headlines on the Drudge Report , like “Tacocopter delivers tacos in any part of San Francisco” (http://tacocopter.com/), while also trying to understand the limitations of a grad student’s research due to the infrequent flyover of a NASA sensor, and lastly, combining tacos and image spectroscopy with the functioning principles of Remote Sensing in The Earth from Above, insofar as the course introduces students to data collection from airborne and orbital systems. When the professor started talking about his own research in urban remote sensing, my mind lit up with visions of scalable systems that can be mounted on remotely piloted or even completely autonomous aircraft that can sense what is happening in the atmosphere and also map out the environment simultaneously. This could provide better data collection on an all-weather platform which, if distributed sufficiently in the atmosphere, would provide greater understanding of multivariate methods in environmental monitoring of the urban or undeveloped kind. The main focal point that my intuition revolves around is the simple variables of time and space. My intuition tells me that if scientists are expected to infer less, they might gravitate towards methods that acquire multiple variables at the same geographic position of time and space, at initial conditions. If the measurements don’t happen frequently enough and at the same locations, then the method of sampling is hampered by the difficulty of interpreting gaps. I don’t believe that statistics can make up for all the gaps.

I believe that unmanned or remotely piloted systems can fill the gaps by providing platforms for multi-sensor packages that can measure multivariate phenomena better than many of the systems that are in use by covering areas of interest more consistently. I believe that scientists might one day fix an even smaller group of units of measurement into a common standard through associations like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. If intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations really want to bring Climate Change awareness and standards for mitigating anthropogenic effects in the Biosphere, then they should be thinking in the same manner. The problem in getting people to see eye to eye is due to a lack of consistent information, whether the topic is covered improperly by the press, or just completely over-politicized by partisan thinking, it could use a little help from less scientists and better methods. I don’t think the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is a convincing measure of how dynamic climate is and how it changes over time in relations to humans. So what I’m suggesting is that we need a smartphone capability of environmental monitoring just like generation Y needs crowdsourcing. Using technology like this can empower the average person to not only be aware, but she or he can participate. Wunderground.com already does this by including more weather stations in a proprietary forecasting method that can be compared with National Weather Service reports.

If this vision I have doesn’t require a conventional pilot, then drones should cost less. Of course, that is not exactly the case in the over-publicized military drones that are mostly controlled through Department of Defense command and control satellite links. What most people don’t know is that, as NASA and the FAA follow their roadmaps to Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), they will not be testing satellite communication as the principle standard for UAS integration. The future of civil and commercial drones in our national airspace will most likely be controlled by ground based radio systems that will have to employ some understanding of viewsheds, but applied to radio propagation.So along with the technological standards involved, the problem of integration is without a doubt- geographic in nature.

A year has passed since I first started day dreaming about drones, and now I’m closer to what their big future is all about. I’ve taken an eight hour class on how to choose a drone for the purpose of doing low level aerial photography applied to precision agriculture. I have attended a five day seminar in Peru last spring, where I got to see first-hand how, a couple of people from more developed countries are trying to get people in the rest of the world on the road to integrating Unmanned/Remotely Piloted Systems into national and international airspaces. I’ve come to learn that integration is a complex problem that requires a lot of knowledge from Air Traffic Management and a good understanding of Human Factors. It involves science, technology, people, property, and, eventually, politics.

What a lot of people don’t know about drones is that the stakeholders aren’t interested in watching us dance naked in our backyards, but they do want to make money; their interest is predicated on two simple motivators: time and money. The three Ds of drone importance are: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Of course, this conjures up thoughts about the same combat systems that have been used overseas. My only response is, DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT PEOPLE WILL ALLOW THE GOVERNMENT TO WEAPONIZE EVERYDAY SYSTEMS THAT FLY OVER OUR HOUSES? It’s not going to happen, and in the cases of Department of Homeland Security using military drones to protect the border right now, has anyone heard of them being armed? I didn’t think so.

Most of the organizations that have Special Airworthiness Certificates or Certificates of Waiver or Authorization (COA) from the FAA, have obtained them for the purpose of research. NASA had an overwhelmingly successful operation using a COA for what came to be known as the Western States Fire Missions, where drones actually helped save lives here in California. This was made possible because NASA had access to the military’s satellite communications and what was once military hardware for achieving such unprecedented results. With almost real time processing (11 minutes), incident commanders could effectively identify hot targets using imagery uploaded to Google Earth from a MODIS “like” sensor that piggybacked off of a military drone system. Firefighters on the ground were then directed more efficiently to places that they normally couldn’t see without the help of this new drone remote sensing platform.

Recently, I interviewed a man named Chuck Johnson. He is the program manager for the Unmanned Systems Integration in the National Airspace System at NASA. His job is to follow a road map for research and collaboration that will really determine the big future of drones. He was once an air traffic controller and eventually made his way into the research side of Human Factors at the FAA and, later, NASA. I thought he would be an interesting person to profile. In a series of articles for the UCSB Geography Department news, I plan on presenting more information on specific details of integrating drones so that the community of scientists and concerned citizens can have more knowledge on the subject. Some topics will include navigation, communications, and who some of the stakeholders are.

For more basic facts on Unmanned Aircraft Systems from the Federal Aviation Administration, check this link. The following video links are from the interview I did with Chuck Johnson, starting with his background and what Integration involves. Special thanks to Bill Norrington for his interest in this topic and his assistance with editing this article.

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The author, Kevin Wengler, is a senior undergrad working towards a BA in Geography. Last year he finished the GIS and Remote Sensing course blocks, and this Fall Quarter he is focusing on independent research like 3D reconstruction of point clouds and the following theme: remotely controlled systems called drones. He is a non-traditional student and veteran from the US Army Signal Corps. His travels, work overseas, and his prior knowledge of communications electronics add spice to his opinions. Before focusing on his education for good in 2009, he spent four years living in Peru where he met his future wife Bertha. He learned Spanish and discovered that English has more exceptions than rules.

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The author and his wife Bertha at the top of Huayna Picchu peak in Machu Picchu, Peru, 2011.

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The author(left) with Chuck Johnson(right) in his office at NASA’s Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility, August 24th, 2012.

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Ryan Firebee was a series of target drones/unmanned aerial vehicles. The earliest attempt at a powered unmanned aerial vehicle was A. M. Low’s “Aerial Target” of 1916. Nikola Tesla described a fleet of unmanned aerial combat vehicles in 1915. A number of remote-controlled airplane advances followed, including the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane, during and after World War I, including the first scale RPV (Remote Piloted Vehicle), developed by the film star and model airplane enthusiast Reginald Denny in 1935. More were made in the technology rush during World War II; these were used both to train antiaircraft gunners and to fly attack missions. Nazi Germany also produced and used various UAV aircraft during the course of WWII. Jet engines were applied after World War II, in such types as the Teledyne Ryan Firebee I of 1951, while companies like Beechcraft also got in the game with their Model 1001 for the United States Navy in 1955. Nevertheless, they were little more than remote-controlled airplanes until the Vietnam Era (Wikipedia: Unmanned aerial vehicle)

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USAF Lockheed U-2 Dragon Lady. The birth of U.S. UAVs (called RPVs at the time) began in 1959 when United States Air Force (USAF) officers, concerned about losing pilots over hostile territory, began planning for the use of unmanned flights. This plan became intensified when Francis Gary Powers and his “secret” U-2 were shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960. Within days, the highly classified UAV program was launched under the code name of “Red Wagon.” The August 2 and August 4, 1964, clash in the Tonkin Gulf between naval units of the U.S. and North Vietnamese Navy initiated America’s highly classified UAVs into their first combat missions of the Vietnam War. When the “Red Chinese” showed photographs of downed U.S. UAVs via Wide World Photos, the official U.S. response was, “no comment” (Wikipedia: Ibid.)

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A UAV detecting an underground facility. UAVs perform a wide variety of functions. The majority of these functions are some form of remote sensing; this is central to the reconnaissance role most UAVs fulfill. Less common UAV functions include interaction and transport. Although UAVs are today most commonly associated with military actions, UAVs are increasingly being used by civilian government agencies, businesses, and private individuals. In the United States, for example, government agencies use drones to patrol the nation’s borders, scout property, and hunt down fugitives. Some privacy scholars argue that the domestic use of drones for surveillance will ultimately benefit privacy by encouraging society to demand greater privacy rights. Law enforcement and other government agencies are not the only entities that use UAVs. Private citizens and media organizations use UAVs as well. Occupy Wall Street journalist Tim Pool uses what he calls an Occucopter, for live feed coverage of Occupy movement events. The “occucopter” is an inexpensive Parrot AR.Drone radio controlled quadrotor, with cameras attached and controllable by Android devices or iOS devices such as the iPhone (Wikipedia: Ibid.)

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