Students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, which is the only university in Pennsylvania recognized by the Federal Aviation Administration as an FAA Collegiate Training Institution, will be flying higher now that the the school has bought a high-tech hybrid drone for its training program.
The drone was purchased using funding from a federal Build Back Better Regional Challenge grant to advance IUP’s Geospatial Intelligence and Unmanned Aircraft Systems Certificate Programs. The WingtraOne Gen II hybrid drone is classified as a hybrid drone because it has both the ability to take off and land vertically in compact areas and to fly at altitude using fixed wings.
Like traditional vertical take-off and landing drones such as quadcopters, the Wingtra One also has the ability to lift off and land vertically enabling flight missions in locations with limited area for take-off and landing. But once the Wingtra drone has completed its vertical takeoff, it can flip so that it flies as a fixed-wing aircraft, with air moving over its wings as the aircraft moves forward.
“This means that compared to traditional quadcopter and hexacopter drones which generate lift and maintain flight with multiple rotating propellers and no wings, the WingtraOne can fly for significantly longer time periods, over larger land areas using less battery power and acquire high-resolution imagery from higher altitudes, with high-accuracy location positioning limiting the need to establish ground control on larger or more difficult to access sites,” John Benhart, professor of regional planning in IUP’s Department of Geography, Geology, Environment and Planning and director of IUP’s Geospatial Intelligence Certificate Programs and Unmanned Aircraft Systems Certificate Programs, said in a release.
Benhart said that the Wingtra drone’s capabilities will allow student and faculty to do research and field work, using the aircraft and its sensors to acquire data in support of research on high accuracy 2-D and 3-D mapping, sea level rise, post-hurricane coastal development patterns, land cover and habitat delineation, animal population dynamics, and invasive plant species distribution.
“Because the WingtraOne can fly for longer periods and is configured to carry different types of sensors and high-accuracy GPS positioning capabilities it can be used for acquiring data over rugged or difficult to access terrain such as mountainous or densely vegetated areas, coastal zones, or sites where property access may be limited,” Benhart said. “This makes the Wingtra system very useful, and I think a ‘game changer’ in terms of our ability to conduct drone flight missions to support myriad research at IUP.”
The cost of the drone and sensors was about $38,000.
The Build Back Better is part of the nearly $1 million IUP received in September 2022 through the BBB Regional Challenge Grant to support four initiatives at IUP, including the IUP STEAMSHOP. Additional IUP infrastructure funded by that $1 million grant include robotics equipment for application and research, artificial intelligence computing platforms to support data analytics and computer science investigations, biometric devices for safety science analysis, and software and drones for geological-geospatial intelligence development.
IUP was certified by the FAA in June 2023 to participate in its Unmanned Aircraft Systems-Collegiate Training Initiative program.
IUP has offered an Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Science and Applications Certificate since 2019, which prepare students to become FAA-certified remote pilots of small-unmanned aircraft, which are defined by the FAA as aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds.
“IUP was really ahead of the curve in terms of using drones to do mapping in our Geographic Information Science program,” Dr. Benhart said. “Offering the training for students to prepare to become FAA-certified remote pilots and to carry out drone flight missions to meet a variety of objectives was a natural outgrowth of our programs in the department.”
