Delivering supplies to unreachable locations, tracking endangered wildlife, performing at the Coachella music festival—some of the many, varied uses for drone technology. The innovative and creative industries emerging from commercial drones are part of the history being documented at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
According to Roger Connor, the curator of the Museum’s remotely piloted and autonomous aircraft collection, visitors often walk right by an unexpected drone example at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia—the Grumman F6F-3K Hellcat. It was “one of the first significant uses of a drone outside of target practice,” Connor said, when the plane was sent on an unmanned flight into the atomic bomb testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Photographic plates and other instrumentation on board the aircraft were used to take samples of what was going on inside the atomic clouds.
This is a perfect example of one of the use cases for drones, which Connor classifies at the “3 D’s”: dull, dirty, and dangerous. Flying into an atomic mushroom cloud? Dirty—meaning anything that’s chemically contaminated or radioactive. Need a flying target for practice by military pilots? That’s a dangerous mission that drones can be used for. Dull use cases are often ones where flights are longer than humans can withstand piloting an aircraft—but a drone can be up in the air for 24 or 48 hours without a problem.
These uses cases—and the economic angles, in particular—are pushing today’s commercial drone industry. For the past several years, the Museum has been acquiring what Connor describes as “breakthrough examples” of civilian drones (many of which will be on display for the first time in the upcoming We All Fly exhibition, as part of the Museum’s reimagining).
Tuna captains never picked up on the technology, but the military did (it was most notably used in the 2009 rescue of merchant mariner Captain Richard Phillips). The ScanEagle also became a pioneer for the FAA’s commercial integration of drones into the national air system. During the FAA’s testing phase, they used the ScanEagle in the remote north shore of Alaska, working with petroleum companies to monitor the local wildlife. The ScanEagle is quiet enough at altitude to let researchers track various species without scaring them away.
During the Smithsonian’s 2017 Ingenuity Festival, you can see a new generation of drone technology at our Museum in Washington, DC. Exyn Technologies, the commercial arm of the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Sensory & Perception (GRASP) lab will be demonstrating its autonomous drone on Thursday, November 30. These drones are designed to navigate complex environments using onboard sensors and artificial intelligence, including the “Fukushima Challenge,” an obstacle course designed to test how a drone could be used in a nuclear disaster. During Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, radiation was too high for a helicopter to fly over it. The United States military provided drones to peer into the damaged reactor buildings, and the GRASP lab is taking it to the next level. Their automated drone is designed to go into a dangerous area and navigate around things like broken wires and fallen beams, to scan and take photographs for rescue teams.
On Thursday, November 30, see drones in action at the Smithsonian’s Ingenuity Festival. Join the Museum for a day of space and aviation exploration, and follow the conversation online with #SmithsonianIngenuity.
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