Central Connecticut State University Professor Presenting Drone Technology and FAA Regulations at Yale

Alfred Gates professor of engineering at CCSU will lecture about Small Unmanned Aerials Systems, sUAS, technology and the Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, regulations of manned aircraft and provide his opinion on how they will address the commercialization of sUAS at Yale on April 15 from 6:00-7:15PM. See http://asmenh.org/events/gates/ for more details, location and a Bio of Alfred Gates. The lecture will address using remote control model aircraft as drones and the required components that make up the aircraft. He will discuss applications of drone aircraft once the FAA makes a ruling on civilian commercialization of drones anticipated in 2015.

Multicopter aircraft have potential to be used for commercial operations for photography of real-estate weddings and other events. Currently being compensated to fly remote control or drone aircraft violates the FAA regulations. Other applications of multicoptes are building and bridge inspection, environmental air and water sampling. The farming industry would use them for crop monitoring and property management. A very important application for drone aircraft will be a first response for search and rescue. Drone aircraft can be used to evaluate hurricane and other natural disaster damaged areas. Drone aircraft can be programmed to fly in a grid like pattern with a thermal imaging camera at an extremely low coast compared with manned fixed wing aircraft and helicopters.

Also they will fly in a more accurate pattern and in weather conditions than manned aircraft would be unable to fly in. Gates and his students are working on modifying multicopters to fly in rain and snow. He will be testing the aircraft with a thermal imaging system this summer to determine the reliability and accuracy of his systems. In the photo below a quadcopter is hovering in a position hold mode in front of Redi Nasto a mechanical engineering student, holding a hexcopter and Alfred Gates on the right. The quadcopter is proof of concept aircraft capable of flying in the rain and snow and has flown several times in snowy conditions. Gates and Nasto have developed a hexcopter capable of flying in the rain and snow by using readily available airframe components and electronics with the addition of two frame components and two aircraft body panels.