A discussion on deploying drones for international development

Last month, Deutsche Post DHL transported six kilograms of medicine from a pharmacy in Bonn, across the Rhine River, to its headquarters.

This wouldn't have made international news, except that DHL accomplished this with an unmanned aircraft system - commonly known as a drone.

This came less than a week after Amazon's Jeff Bezos claimed his company would deliver products to customers' doorsteps via drone in three or four years. Regulations  and technological hurdles would make Bezos' plan all but impossible in the US near-term, but DHL proved that with proper planning and logistics, you could deliver small parcels with small drones today.

On January 22, The International Research and Exchange Board, or IREX, will be hosting a "deep dive" discussion on how this same technology could benefit international development.

Missed target, found hooliganism on drone mapping mission

A small unmanned aircraft system for mapping, developed for a National Science Foundation grant to improve STEM education.

In north Louisiana, there’s a fantastic little place known for Muscadine grapes, pecans, and on occasion, alligators.

Muscadines always get turned into jelly; an excellent topping for southern-style biscuits (my wife says she’s still working on mastering the family biscuit recipe, but she’s produced the finest biscuits I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating).

Pecans, a grocery bag of which could fetch a gold bar by northern exchange rates, are so plentiful that they must be given away. They’re so much a part of my wife’s heritage that we decided to get married beneath those pecan trees.

And when the water is high in the backyard bayou, a small alligator sometimes will make itself at home. If the alligator is lovingly cared for and becomes fat, a portion of that alligator eventually will make its way to our dinner table in the form of a delightful alligator sauce piquant (wife insists that it be cooked like shrimp, and not burnt to a crisp as it’s done here in the North).

So before we went down to visit my wife’s family farm for Thanksgiving, I decided to pack up one of the “drones” I’ve developed at the National Science Foundation grant where I work, to see if I couldn’t map out this interesting place.

There's been a big uptick in drone research over the last decade

Recently, I was tasked with producing some basic citations on unmanned aerial vehicles, more commonly called drones, for a new grant proposal. As you could imagine, it was not hard to find a cornucopia of papers reflecting the many novel uses for the technology.

What might surprise some, though, was the sheer increase in drone research, how popular these papers are in the academic world, what that research trying to accomplish, and who was funding it.