A pilot’s job might soon be a thing of the past, according to a UNM graduate student’s research.
Ivana Palunko, a second year Ph.D. student, is studying small-scale unmanned helicopters and other vehicles. Palunko, a native of Croatia, recently won an award from the National Foundation for Science, Higher Education and Technological Development of the Republic of Croatia.
Palunko said Croatia developed the award to encourage the kind of technical research she is doing with unmanned helicopters.
“I was in my fourth year and I was choosing what my thesis would be for my masters,” Palunko said. “Then one of the assistants — he got a small helicopter as a toy — and he was like, ‘Do you want to do this?’ I was like, ‘Why not?’ It seemed interesting.”
She said her award included $4,000, a laptop and a cell phone.
Palunko decided to further the research she began in Croatia at UNM. She works with the Multi-Agent, Robotics, Hybrid, and Embedded Systems Laboratory research group at UNM.
Research with quad-rotors — helicopters with four rotors — are Palunko’s main focus.
“Usually you have those toys that you can fly around and have a remote control.
People can do that,” she said. “So, my part in that is that you don’t have to have a remote, you have your laptop and an interface. You can say, ‘Oh, I want you to go someplace like Sandia, and measure the temperature in five places and come back.’ That’s everything that you need to do and it will do the rest.”
Chaouki Abdallah, department chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said research on unmanned aircrafts isn’t new and most planes and jets are already controlled by computers.
Pilots are only needed as supervisors and to take over if the autopilot controls malfunction, Abdallah said.
“Every airplane you fly in is really flown by an autopilot and the real pilot comes in only periodically to do certain things,” he said. “A lot of the space vehicles, for example, are not really being flown by people — automatic controllers are really taking care of everything. In fact, a modern jet plane cannot be controlled by a human.”
Senior Priscilla Padilla said she would fly in an unmanned aircraft if it were tested for safety.
“I would prefer a pilot in a plane to go somewhere like New York, but if they came up with a way where we wouldn’t need one, I’d trust it as long as I wasn’t the first person to try it,” she said.
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Abdallah said robotics is becoming a popular area of research, especially in America. He said research like Palunko’s could be used to save lives.
“It’s an area where a lot a people are interested in trying to coordinate things, like search and rescue,” Abdallah said. “The helicopter could be like the eye in the sky and you have other robots on the ground doing something else.”
Abdallah said Palunko’s research is more in-depth than that of many engineers who work at other laboratories or companies.
“At the University, we can afford to really understand the fundamentals of the problem so that next time — even if it’s a totally different robot or helicopter — we understand the models and can predict what should be done and can do it better,” he said.
Padilla said the future of robotics could raise the standard of living for America and the rest of the world.
“If they could make it to where I didn’t have to drive either that would be great,” she said. “I’d start my car and say, ‘Go to school.’ Then I’d be a happy camper.”
