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Equipped with wide, zoom, and thermal-imaging cameras, the drones sent real-time video footage to the university’s security-operations center, where public-safety employees monitored traffic flow. If a car were to block a busy road or a dorm parking lot got too full, officers would know immediately.
This is just one way the university has used drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Professors check them out to conduct research, officials use them to record promotional videos and put on light shows, and security officers count on them for surveillance.
“Drones have proliferated themselves completely across almost all parts of campus,” said Daniel Hesselius, the university’s director of flight operations.
Currently, the university owns about 150 fully operational drones and has about the same number of trained pilots on campus. Overseeing the fleet is the Division of Public Safety’s flight-operations team that trains pilots and approves UAVs for flight. Since the team was formed in 2017, 500 community members have gone through some version of the department’s “flight school.”
Boulder’s bet on drones has paid off in research funding and a leg up for scholars studying the technology’s aerospace and environmental applications. As a chill has descended over federal-research sponsorship during President Trump’s second term, drone research is still in demand, and professors at Boulder are taking advantage.
Frew, now a professor in the department of aerospace engineering sciences, came to Boulder at an opportune moment. The university was already developing some drone technology, starting around 2000, and the new center had grown out of existing research projects by faculty across departments, largely aerospace and telecommunications.
RECUV’s first big project, according to Brian Argrow, a distinguished professor in the department of aerospace engineering sciences, was funded by the Air Force in 2004. The project developed a mobile-communications system through flying small fleets of drones, all of which were built at the center. “A lot of what we do today was derived from that first project with the Air Force,” said Argrow.
The military’s interest in drones grew out of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The early 2000s saw some of the nation’s most significant advancements in UAV technology, including the infamous “predator” and “reaper” drones in 2001 and 2002, respectively. The American military’s use of drones throughout the Middle East is well documented and has been a nonstop source of controversy.
Much of the drone research conducted at the university has unambiguous ties to the military. Frew specializes in autonomous systems and is the current director for the Center for Autonomous Air Mobility and Sensing, a multicampus organization of which Boulder is a member. The NSF has awarded millions in funding to Frew’s work through the center, which has industry partners that include Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and the Department of Homeland Security.
But as the technology advanced throughout the 2000s, drones also came on the market for civilian use. Boulder was on the leading edge. In 2007, the university hosted the first Civilian Application of Unmanned Aircraft Systems conference, which featured representatives from several government agencies.
Around this time, drone use on campus was taking off. Argrow was in charge of approving drones for flight and training pilots, but use was so widespread he found he couldn’t do it alone. So he and Frew helped set up an advisory committee that eventually became the Flight Operations team.
Today, the team consists of two full-time staff and one undergraduate student. Hesselius, the director, is a former Air Force pilot, and the instructor and engineer, John Hales, has a background in operating drones for private companies.
Hesselius says his department’s main responsibility is oversight — making sure that all UAVs are piloted by people with appropriate training, and following the correct regulations about where they can fly. “Ten years ago, we just had a few researchers flying drones on campus, but now we have dozens and dozens of researchers in nearly every college on campus that fly drones,” he said. “We also have our facilities people, whether that’s for housing and dining facilities or regular facilities. Athletics flies drones for the purposes of capturing footage of practices. Our police department flies drones for public safety, and has many uses that are on the horizon in that front. Even our media relations.”
Hales, the instructor and engineer for flight operations, teaches the department’s ground school. Anyone affiliated with the university who needs to operate a UAV can attend the two-day courses he directs at the beginning of each semester, complete with an oral examination and a practical flight portion using the Flight Operations’ quadcopter.
“It’s not enough just to learn how to fly a drone,” Hales said. “You want to learn how to think like a safe pilot too.”
Along with pilot training and inspection, Flight Operations also helps think through public-safety applications of drones on campus. The fleets monitoring traffic during move-in were what Hesselius called the first phase of a drone-as-a-first-responder program.
“It’s a program where somebody could launch a drone, say, a police dispatcher, the first time they get a call about an incident,” he said. “They could immediately remotely launch a drone by pushing a button on their desk, and the drone will take off automatically and autonomously fly to that location and start bringing footage back for what’s going on, oftentimes before an officer could possibly get there.”
Hesselius also said the department is testing drones that can be flown indoors, utilizing goggles that show the drone’s feed in first-person view. “So you can imagine a scenario where, if you need to clear a building, rather than putting an officer into the building, you have that officer fly a drone through a window or through a door, and then they can remain outside. They can fly that drone throughout the building, looking for the threat, to see if there’s a threat there.”
Outside of the aerospace department, one of the university’s largest users of drones for their research is the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, an interdisciplinary climate-studies lab.
Kevin Rozmiarek, a Ph.D. candidate working at the institute, said he hadn’t used UAVs in his work before coming to Boulder. But now he and his team can collect and analyze gases in the atmosphere to better understand carbon emissions.
“Typically, the relationship that a researcher has with administration is that administration is a bureaucratic limiting tool that doesn’t define what you can do, but what you can’t do,” he said. But working with Flight Operations taught Rozmiarek how to operate drones and navigate FAA regulations, and introduced new possibilities for the institute’s research, he said. The lab currently owns a set of drones, and frequently rents others from the drone library for its expeditions.
In the summer of 2022, Rozmiarek was part of the first ever scientific team to sample the atmospheric composition over Greenland — an accomplishment that he said took years of preparation and a lot of help from flight operations. His lab used a drone with a 10-foot wingspan to collect air samples and analyze them to produce unique findings on Greenland’s atmosphere and determine the larger implications of melting ice caps in Arctic countries.
The Trump administration has been hostile to climate science, and this fact isn’t lost among the university’s researchers. Some of them have reacted to the federal finding in subtle ways.
Nisar Ahmed, RECUV’s current director, said he has run into a few “brick walls” in funding applications, specifically regarding climate research. But, he spoke at length about the “pivots” researchers can make in applying for funding.
Rozmiarek echoed that. “I could say, for example, I’m trying to increase the American drone presence over Greenland. That is something that my co-authors might roll their eyes at, but what we’re trying to do is communicate the synergistic overlap between my work and with the set of agencies that are trying to survive the top-level administration’s goals.”
Rozmiarek said leaning into the way his work develops drone technology, especially given the recent federal commitment to U.S. dominance in combat drones in light of the war in Ukraine, has been essential to maintaining funding.
“That’s how we’re trying to adapt, and the fact that we have drones as a major focus is a little bit of a technological lifeline for what we’re doing.”
