UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — “Alright, are you ready, Mike? Motor’s hot! Launch! Launch! Launch!”
With those final commands from aerospace engineering doctoral candidate John Bird, the AutoSOAR unmanned air vehicle was launched into the sky above the Russell E. Larson Agricultural Research Center at Rock Springs, releasing with it nearly a year of bottled-up anticipation among faculty, staff and graduate students across the Penn State community.
Unmanned air vehicles are flying again at Penn State for research, teaching and public service under the auspices of the Office for Research Protections. A new UAV program will ensure compliance with Federal Aviation Administration rules and puts in place an insurance, registration and procedural infrastructure to govern the outdoor operation of unmanned air systems at the University.
“With the emergence in popularity of unmanned air vehicles and essentially the ubiquity of these aircraft, it was becoming a combination of a privacy hazard and a safety hazard,” said Mike Yukish, the University’s newly appointed unmanned air systems operations manager, who is also head of the Manufacturing Product and Process Design Department in the Applied Research Lab and assistant professor of aerospace engineering. “All of a sudden the FAA said, ‘Structure. We need structure.’ And so Penn State was put in a position of immediately needing to put a process in place for UAVs that is centralized and controlled.”