UVic to develop drone aircraft for civilian use

Jenner Richards foresees a not-so-distant future where any farmer in Greater Victoria could send an unmanned aircraft into the air – whenever they want – to check on the health of their crops.

“The special cameras (on the aircraft) can tell you whether it’s getting enough water, whether it’s stressed out, whether it’s healthy; and by looking at that you can optimize where (crops are) worth planting, where it’s not worth planting, where you should harvest first,” says Richards, manager of the University of Victoria’s new Centre for Aerospace Research.

The small centre, located north of the Victoria International Airport, will become a site for students to research and develop unmanned air vehicle (UAV) technology to make it commercially accessible and available to civilians.

“We will be looking at the airplane design, the electronics, avionics, we’re talking about propulsion, payload, how to do the processing of the data. All these things will be part of this program,” says Afzal Suleman, an aerospace engineer and chair of UVic’s Aerospace Centre. “The idea is to create better (UAVs). We’re talking smaller ones, but also (UAVs that have) lighter environmental footprints.”

On Friday, North Vancouver MP Andrew Saxton, on behalf of Western Economic Diversification, announced $671,500 in funding for the centre.

Richards says there’s currently a huge gap in supplies in the UAV sector – there’s little offered between million-dollar military drones and pieced-together hobby shop airplanes.

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