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. The goal of this 45-year old not-for-profit is to “enable local individuals and institutions to build key elements of a vibrant society,” a mission which includes strengthening education and independent media, and leveraging technology for development.

I’ll be speaking at this event and helping participants envision applications for unmanned aircraft and international development, along with Jessica Leber (Fast Company, Co.Exist), Tom Snitch (University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies), Paola Santana (Matternet), and Timothy Reuter (Drone User Group Network). See the IREX press release for more information.

In the United States, journalists are severely limited to access to the skies, and only hobbyists or government institutions can fly drones. However in developing countries, there are a multitude of ways in which drones could aid reporters.

Above protests in Thailand, Turkey, Argentina, Estonia, Poland, and Russia, we’ve seen how small unmanned aircraft can give critical insight into the size of political uprisings, and provide evidence of police tactics. We just as likely could see reporters in developing nations using drones to monitor elections, record human rights abuses, and measure the impact of natural disasters and resource extraction.

Next to delivery drones, drone journalism may be the most widely-known use of this technology. But in the developed world, the largest single sector for unmanned technology will be agriculture. Drones both large and small have potential as vehicles to precisely deliver pesticides and herbicides, and collect crop data that allow minimum inputs for maximum yields.

Where access to water is at a premium, drones could help farmers do more with less. And any time a producer can reduce environmental impact through reduced chemical use or sustainable farming methods, the local community and the ecosystem benefit.

Of course, this isn’t to diminish the value of the drone as a means of transport. Paola Santana, Co-Founder, Head of Regulatory & Legal Affairs at Matternet, is one of the people working to make airborne delivery a possibility where ground-based delivery is treacherous or impossible. She’ll also be speaking at IREX.

In “developed” countries, where drones have to weave through increasingly cluttered skies and negotiate numerous physical and legal complexities on the ground, drones have to avoid the infrastructure. But in an international development context, where drones deliver much-needed services to undeserved areas, drones become the infrastructure.

It could turn out that developing countries are in the best position to make use of this technology.

To understand what the Drones for Schools program is, and how it came about, it helps to know a few things about my background. I didn’t originally set out to be a STEM educator. I had some science education from studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate, but eventually wound up with a master’s in journalism. I didn’t think the two halves of my life would merge until I finished my master’s and took a job at a K-12 STEM education grant, at the University of Illinois – they needed someone with a scientific background to handle communications and study the social networks that teachers were forming as part of the grant.

At the time, I was researching how journalists could use aerial robots, commonly called “drones”, to capture data during natural and man-made disasters. As part of this research, I was spending a great deal of time in my basement “hacking” together a small drone from a radio controlled airplane and open-source hardware. It became apparent that this learning experience mirrored what teachers were doing in the STEM grant, and so I approached my boss, a department head in the College of Education one of the co-principal investigators for the grant, with a pitch: let’s have students design, build, and fly drones at our partner schools. He assembled a team of STEM educators to guide the process, and the “Drones for Schools” initiative was born.

Two students collaborate to build a “drone”.

In some ways, the program resembles a nesting doll for concepts in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. A drone is a complex machine, and once you peek inside, one STEM concept leads to another. To design the aircraft, you begin with concepts like Bernoulli’s principle, which when applied through a mathematical formula, determines parameters such as stall speed (how slow the plane can fly before falling out of the sky). Stall speed dictates the power you need to fly, which opens an opportunity to deliver content about electricity and electric motors. And delivering content about electricity and electric motors segues nicely into lessons about battery chemistry and capacity. All the while, students are applying this content knowledge as they make key decisions about how this aircraft will be designed and deployed.

Because this is a semi-autonomous aircraft that is dependent on a small microcontroller, computer programming is interwoven into the Drones for Schools curriculum. Students take this full-function microcontroller, which uses hackable open-source hardware and software, and learn programming by getting it to do some things it wasn’t intended to do. They learn about electronics prototyping by wiring up the microcontroller to external LEDs, and by writing C code to enabe the microcontroller to blink out a Morse code, they learn about variables, arguments, loops, functions, and libraries.

Soldering is one of the many skills that students learn through the Drones for Schools program.

These individual lessons are valuable on their own, but the program’s biggest gains come from students assuming the roles of engineers. This program was designed in part to meet the demands of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which were developed by the National Research Council to help prepare K-12 students for an world where science literacy is increasingly necessary. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges and opportunities presented by NGSS, is the incorporation of engineering education into the K-12 science curriculum, something which hasn’t been attempted on this scale. To help students understand what makes them engineers in the Drones for Schools program, and how that’s different from what scientists do, we’ve had a graduate engineering student explain how engineers make models, design solutions, and test those solutions. The engineering student also provided high school students with information on how their interests in the Drones for Schools program could lead to an education in engineering, and what an engineering career path looks like.

Drones for Schools is just one of around 30 collaborations at the National Science Foundation grant EnLiST, which stands for Entrepreneurial Leadership in STEM Teaching and learning. Each collaboration is unique, but they are all “entrepreneurial,” meaning they draw on resources from other classrooms, university faculty, community organizations, and businesses. Drones for Schools is no different than the other collaborations in the sense that we rely on community partners to provide a useful application for the drone. The drone is not built for the sake of building a drone; rather it is built because it can provide high-resolution images of the ground which can be stitched together in a map. And that data has use for farmers, city planners, researchers, first responders, and many others. Simply put, we think there is a need for drones in the community, and our students are trying to fill that need.

Testing out one of the class’ inventions

AUVSI, the Association for Unmanned Vehicles and Systems International, predicts that 30,000 drones will be flying by 2020, with the majority of those serving as farm equipment. Depending on the definition of a drone, the US may already have exceeded that number. The goal of this program isn’t to ensure that one of our students will engineer one of those drones someday, although technically they’re already building and flying one of those 30,000 when take part of our initiative. Rather, we’re interested in our classroom data, which suggests the initiative increases interest in engineering. And in that sense, I think we’ve succeeded.

UIUC faculty and staff associated with this grant are currently seeking other grants to specifically enrich middle school STEM education. Because of the tremendous learning opportunities packed into these flying robots (some of which are small enough to fly in a classroom), and because of their real-world importance, we believe that drones will be an integral part of STEM opportunities for some time.

Link to audio file (24:09)

In this episode Matthew Schroyer speaks with Nick Kohut, CEO of Dash Robotics, about their foldable hexapod robot and the ongoing crowdfunding campaign to get them into the hands of budding engineers, kids and hobbyists.

Dash is the result of years of research in fast prototyping of bioinspired robots at Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley (see Fearing Podcast or Hoover Podcast). The palm-sized origami robot is now available for the general public to build and program. The robot takes inspiration from insect locomotion by using compliant and light weight hardware to drive over difficult terrain without using any complex controllers (see Bob Full podcast). You can check out their Dragon crowdfunding campaign for a chance to get one of the first 1000 robots. The campaign ends on October 2nd.

Nick Kohut
Nick Kohut is the co-founder and CEO of Dash Robotics. He is also a postdoc at Stanford University in Mark Cutkosky’s Biomimetics and Dextrous Manipulation Laboratory, working on a variable stiffness suspension element for humanoid robotics. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, in Ron Fearing’s Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, developing small legged robots. His research focused on the development of an active tail to enable high speed turning. In the past, he also did research on centimeter scale robots, and using GPS and traffic information to improve fuel economy.

Links:

• Download mp3 (10.9MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Nick Kohut

First, most modern robots are driven by computers, and those computers are driven by computer code. For a child or young adult, computer coding can be an excellent gateway into robotics, and it’s never been easier to learn how to code. Websites such as CodeAcademy.com, CodeSchool.com, LearnStreet.com, TryRuby.org, provide lessons in several languages like C, C++, JavaScript, Ruby and Python.

I would say that it ultimately doesn’t matter which language a student chooses to learn, as the world of software development is continually churning out new languages and making older languages obsolete (COBOL, anyone?). What matters is understanding basic concepts like loops and boolean arguments, learning how to break down problems in a way that a computer can process and solve them, and being able to look through someone’s code and understand which line of code does what.

Second, it’s useful to understand how a robot’s computer code and physical parts (such as motors and sensors) work together as a system. Thanks to the “maker movement,” there’s a range of relatively inexpensive systems on the market today that make it increasingly easy for anyone to jump in and make a simple robot. These systems usually consist of a small circuit board that is embedded with a microcontroller “brain”, along with various connectors to hook up external devices. They frequently can be purchased in “kit” form, with a variety of odds-and-ends (LEDs, buttons, sensors, various small electrical components) and reading material that helps guide people through projects of varying complexity. They’re similar to the electronics kits of yore, but capable of so much more.

In a sense, these boards function as tiny home computers, except instead of plugging in keyboards or mice to manipulate programs, you’re plugging in servos to give the robot movement, or light sensors that enable the robot to sense and act differently in bright and dark environments. Arduino, BeagleBone, and RaspberryPi are all boards that are designed so that novice programmers can build functional electronics from the first project. Websites such as Arduino.cc and RaspberryPi.org carry some introductory exercises on doing basic things with these systems (getting a light to blink Morse code, for example), but there are many sophisticated projects scattered across the web by people who are very good at documenting the prototyping process and sharing code.

Last, there’s much a person can accomplish on their own, but the learning process can be much more efficient and fulfilling with the right mentor. These mentors can be found at places like FabLabs, Makerspaces, and hackerspaces, which are places where people who have an interest in programming, digital fabrication, and robotics collaborate. Increasingly, these workshops can be found at libraries and community centers. If one doesn’t exist, it’s possible to rally support in a community to create such a place.

The resources and tools at these workshops are very useful for building robots, and the people who congregate in them can provide useful advice, but a mentor need not be affiliated with any of these places to teach robotics. All a student really needs is a dedicated, trustworthy adult who is willing to learn and to teach.