Objectives

Our main objective is to design, build and operate drones for commercial applications. We would like to explore how UAV-drones operations open up new possibilities for airbone, marine and terrestrial data acquisition, detection, exploration and monitoring activities.

Several major problems that the drone industry is currently facing are: (1) limited operation range - most drones can only fly within the visual line-of-sight (LOS) distances of the controllers (2) limited bandwidth that cannot guarantee real-time high-definition (HD) image/video transmission (3) inaccurate tracking - existing positioning based on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) may not be reliable due to potential spoofing and jamming and (4) limited operation time due to battery constraints.

Drone technology is constantly evolving in the areas of miniaturization, autonomy, and swarms. 

In addition to the technology, security, privacy and safety issues are also important; for example privacy issues ( remotely accessing someone else's drone to take video or images of a private setting), security issues (stealing a drone mid-flight) and safety issues (taking down a drone operated by someone else).