Don't Fear the Dawn of the Drones; Someday One Might Save Your Life

In the not too distant future, you may hear the hum of a drone's rotors as it descends upon you and be filled with a sense of relief, not panic.

After all, it's coming to save you, not harm you.

Research at the University of Cincinnati could soon enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) -- similar to U.S. military drones patrolling the skies of Afghanistan -- to track down missing persons on search-and-rescue missions, to penetrate curtains of smoke during wildfire suppression or possibly even to navigate urban landscapes on delivery runs for online retailers like Amazon. And it all could be done autonomously with a human acting only as a supervisor.

"Drones have gotten a very bad rap for various reasons," says Kelly Cohen, associate professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at UC. "But our students see that unmanned systems can have a positive impact on society."

Cohen and a team of researchers have developed an experimental capability to capture the dynamic behavior of the UAV platform, which complements other work they've done with UAVs in disaster management operations. Wei Wei, one of Cohen's students and the lead author of "Frequency-Domain System Identification and Simulation of a Quadrotor Controller," will present the UAV dynamics research Jan. 16 at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' SciTech 2014 conference in National Harbor, Md. The event unites international aerospace scholars and professionals to collaborate on advances in research, development and technology. In his research, Wei used special engineering software to develop the dynamic model essential for autopilot design for a wide variety of unmanned aircraft having multiple rotors. He's applied his method to quadrotors -- UAVs with four propellers -- and other types of drones, but it can work with nearly any aircraft.