Rise of the Drones

AUVSI President and CEO Michael Toscano appeared alongside MIT's Missy Cummings to discuss the state of the technology. Integrating unmanned aircraft into the National Airspace System will create more than 100,000 jobs, particularly in agriculture, Toscano said, and Cummings said the issue with integration is now more about psychological than technological barriers.

A commercial revolution will take place in agriculture, Cummings said, and the United States is already behind.

"Japan basically does all its crop dusting with UAVs. An entire country," Cummings said.

She predicted that another revolution, that of unmanned cargo delivery, is already taking shape in Afghanistan in the form of the K-Max unmanned helicopter, which now supplies cargo to deployed soldiers and Marines. 

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Another ongoing and growing use of unmanned aircraft is for monitoring wildlife, their habitats and the poachers who are killing some of them in record numbers, said Carter Roberts, the president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund.

Groups like the WWF simply don't always have good information about what's happening on the ground in remote locations and have started using UAS to track animals, discover poachers and then follow them back to their traders.

Privacy issues rarely come into play, because the areas are so remote and the systems help give a small technological edge against the poachers, who are better funded and better equipped, the said.

"We do not want to document the demise of nature," but instead use these systems to get real-time information into the hands of governments who can help the wildlife, Roberts said. 

NASA has found a good use for three military UAVs — in this case, Aerovironment RQ-14 Dragon Eye drones — on loan from the U.S. Marine Corps. Equipped with sensors and cameras, the drones were sent on 10 separate flights into the miasma of sulfur dioxide rising up from the crater of the volcano known as Turrialba near San Jose in Costa Rica.

The overall hope is that the data collected by the drones will form computer models that can help safeguard airspace systems, improve climate predictions, and minimize the dangers for those who live near volcanoes. Of course, even drones would be useless if a volcano erupted in the middle of Los Angeles.

Matthew Fladeland, airborne science manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center, summed things up:

“This project is great example of how unmanned aircraft can be used for beneficial civilian purposes — in this case for better understanding Earth system processes and the impact of volcanism on our atmosphere. By taking these retired military tools, we can very efficiently and effectively collect measurements that improve NASA satellite data and aviation safety.”

“It ends up demystifying this equipment, to show that it’s not only restricted for military use but also something of daily use,” says AGX Tecnologia consultant Jen John Lee in the basement of these homey headquarters.

Going against the trend of Latin American nations purchasing Isreali-made drones for drug-war policing and border patrolling, AGX uses only Brazilian technology developed at the nearby University of São Paulo and sees its target market in the nation’s growing agricultural industry and state “environmental police” forces tasked with monitoring illegal extraction of natural resources.

Brazil’s Federal Police is indeed implementing a fleet of Israeli-made UAVs along its porous frontier to monitor drug trafficking. But the São Paulo Environmental Police has other objectives. They will be the first team in the state to regularly employ unarmed UAVs to monitor threats in rural areas, such as deforestation and illegal fishing.

Taylor Barnes | Oct 18, 2011

latintrade.com

Video on msnbc.com: Japanese scientists are testing a robot that can fly over a volcano and drop a remote controlled ground vehicle to monitor eruptions. NBCNews.com's Dara Brown reports.