OSU drone program aims to unravel weather secrets
By MIKE AVERILL
STILLWATER - Graduate students at Oklahoma State University are designing an unmanned aerial vehicle - more commonly known as a drone - to fly by remote into storms and gather data to improve the understanding of weather systems.
The work is part of the university’s unmanned aerial systems degree program.
The idea is for the students to design and create starting with a clean sheet of paper an unmanned vehicle that will be flown into the lower levels of super cells to collect meteorological information, including data on the formation of tornadoes.
“That’s where most of the circulation starts to build up when a tornado is forming. Right now, there are a lot of unknowns on how a tornado forms. We’d like to get measurements where now we don’t have good data,” said Jamey Jacob, professor of aerospace engineering. “What we want to do is answer the question ‘Why does one super cell form a tornado when another does not?’ ”
This semester, the students are finalizing their designs and will begin construction later in the year.
Last semester, students created drones using the same remote aircraft as hobbyists use but equipped with autopilot and an onboard payload with the capability of identifying a “lost hiker” during a search-and-rescue experiment.
“The goal of that project was to design inexpensive search-and-rescue systems that could be used by search-and-rescue responders,” Jacob said.
“In the scenario, they were looking for a lost hiker … and all three teams were able to successfully identify the hiker on the ground. They had a large search area and knew something was out there but didn’t know where it was.”
OSU has the first and currently only UAS degree option at the graduate level in the country. The option provides students with the opportunity for hands-on analysis, design, construction and flight testing of drone platforms, said Kelly Green, university spokeswoman.
“This is going to be a huge growth area, particularly for Oklahoma,” Jacob said, adding that about 80 percent of the commercial market for drones will be in the agricultural field.
Alyssa Avery, a second-semester graduate student from Edmond, said the challenge of creating an aircraft to send into storms will be putting together everything that’s been learned up to this point.
“We’ve done all the parts separately,” she said. “Having to put that all together and making a reliable unmanned plane that can fly around a storm and not crash … I know we can do it, but it will take some testing. We will get there.”
