Did You Know You Can Major in Drones?

ERAU/Daryl LaBello for The Chronicle

Hunter Tedrick majored in aeronautical engineering during his first two years at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, but he found himself wanting something more hands-on. Then he recalled what had inspired him to attend the aviation-oriented institution in the first place: his passion for building and flying remote-controlled airplanes.

As it turns out, that passion is an academic major at the Daytona Beach campus. At Embry-Riddle and a growing number of institutions around the country, degree programs that teach students how to operate drones are multiplying.

Embry-Riddle, Indiana State University, Kansas State University, and the University of North Dakota are among those that offer bachelor’s degrees in unmanned aircraft systems, or UAS. Sinclair Community College, in Dayton, Ohio, offers an associate degree in the field. And college graduates can pursue master’s or doctorate-level engineering degrees related to drones at Oklahoma State University and at a new for-profit online institution — Unmanned Vehicle University.

North Dakota has about 200 students in drone programs, Kansas State roughly 100, and Embry-Riddle more than 1,000 at its two residential campuses and through its online courses. All the programs were created in the past 10 years, driven by the U.S. military’s demand for drone pilots and a growing commercial sector.

“It’s been exponential growth,” says John M. Robbins, an associate professor of aeronautical science and coordinator of Embry-Riddle’s UAS program.

The growth comes in spite of current concerns about privacy and safety, and longer-term worries expressed by some critics about whether autonomous drone technology — coupled with advances in artificial intelligence — could lead to a dystopian future in which human lives are at risk.

Now a junior majoring in unmanned-aircraft-systems science, Hedrick is back to his old hobby — this time with a view toward launching a new career. He’s president of the drone club at Embry-Riddle, and his team is building a $10,000 drone, a fixed-wing Albatross, which they plan to take to a summer competition in Maryland.

His coursework at Embry-Riddle enables to him to fly a mock Predator, a drone used by U.S. military for reconnaissance and attacks, in a flight simulator. When he graduates, he’s considering applying to work for a Defense Department contractor that uses drones for surveillance.

“I’m looking at all my options right now,” Mr. Tedrick says. “This industry is ready to blow up.”

Other options include agriculture, where drones are used to assess crop health; real estate, where aerial photos add cachet to home listings; and infrastructure inspection, in which drones are used to evaluate bridges, pipelines, and wind turbines without putting human inspectors in danger. The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, the drone trade group, estimates that drones will contribute $82 billion to the U.S. economy in the decade ending in 2025.

Kurt Carraway, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who oversees the drone activities at Kansas State Polytechnic’s Applied Aviation Research Center, says that early graduates of the program were hired by defense contractors, but that now a majority are working for U.S. businesses.

“That’s an indication of the successful commercialization of UAS,” Carraway says.

Fliers advertising the academic programs feature smiling students on grassy fields piloting a quadcopter, but there’s plenty of rigorous academic work, too. Programs typically include courses in engineering, computer science, and robotics. Students operate both multirotor drones, the kind you might see people using in public parks, and fixed-wing drones. They learn how to design and construct drones, how to maintain them, and how use an autopilot system.

This semester at Kansas State Polytechnic, students are using drones to map the southwest Kansas habitat of the lesser prairie chicken, a threatened species. Helicopters have traditionally been used to count the birds, but drones are quieter and less likely to scare them, “and you’re not putting humans in danger,” says David Burchfield, a teaching assistant professor for unmanned aircraft systems and coordinator of the degree program.

The students are predominantly men; just as in regular aviation programs, women typically make up only about 5 to 10 percent of the drone-operations majors. Middle and high schools are helping to stimulate interest by incorporating drones in classes to get students excited about STEM careers. “These unmanned aircraft systems are a fantastic way to talk about science and engineering and technology,” says Paul Snyder, an assistant professor and assistant chair of the UAS program at the University of North Dakota.

Jeremy Spink, a junior at Kansas State Polytechnic, was competing on a robotics team at his Michigan high school when a member of the BentProp Project, a nonprofit that searches for missing World War II aviators, invited his club to participate in searches in Hawaii and Palau. Spink and his classmates used drones to search for downed airplanes in shallow water and in the jungle. His team found a plane abandoned by an American pilot in shallow water, he says, and helped narrow the search area for two other planes that were later found, leading to the retrieval of the remains of five Americans.

The experience prompted him to pursue the most challenging drone-degree program he could find — an engineering technology degree at Kansas State Polytechnic, with a specialization in unmanned aircraft systems. Saeed Khan, a professor of engineering technology who created the UAS option, says that much of the current design work for drones comes from electrical and mechanical engineers with no special knowledge of drones.

“Our thinking is that someone who has an overall systems understanding will be very, very important to companies or the U.S. government,” he says.

Many universities offer short drone programs for those who don’t want a degree. Kansas State Polytechnic offers a three-day course for people who are seeking to pass a federal test that permits the commercial flying of small drones (under 55 pounds). At the opposite end of the spectrum, Unmanned Vehicle University, which is in the process of seeking accreditation, offers a master’s degree and even a doctorate in unmanned systems engineering.

Joschka Hoefling, an engineer for UMS Skeldar, a company based in Switzerland that develops unmanned helicopters, is taking one course at a time as he works on a doctorate through Unmanned Vehicle University. His company pays half the tuition. He recently took a course on flight-test engineering, even as he and several colleagues were working through that challenge on an unmanned helicopter.

“I was able to talk about the tests I’d done at work — what had worked, and what hadn’t,” he says.

The risk of in-air and ground collisions is one reason the FAA has yet to allow civilian drones to be flown beyond a visual line of sight, stymieing a vision that Amazon has been touting for years: an online order delivered via drone in under 30 minutes.

The FAA is expected to relax those regulations eventually — and it may happen soon. In March federal regulators told The Wall Street Journal that limited package delivery may be allowed as soon as this summer, and Amazon officials suggested that they may start drone delivery next year.

Universities are helping to work out the kinks. North Dakota and Harris Corporation, a technology company, are creating a beyond-visual-line-of-sight corridor that runs 80 miles between Fargo and Grand Forks. Drones flying in the corridor will use technology to detect other objects and avoid collisions.

Lately, the sharpest criticism of drone activity has come from those who see long-term risks from advances in autonomous flight and artificial intelligence. Slaughterbots, a seven-minute video released in November by the Future of Life Institute, shows an imagined fleet of autonomous drones that seek out and assassinate college students.

The institute, which seeks to mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence, closed the short film with a grave message from Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. “We have an opportunity to prevent the future you just saw,” he says, “but the window to act is closing fast.”

Mark Askelson, a professor of atmospheric sciences and interim executive director of North Dakota’s new Research Institute for Autonomous Systems, says any moral debate about the use of drones must also consider their positive contributions — finding lost hikers, delivering medicines to remote areas, searching for survivors following a flood.

“There are downsides — we just have to manage them appropriately, like you do with any other technology,” he says.

“We’re extremely excited about what we can do.”