Thanks to a half-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation Texas A&M-Corpus Christi will soon add a new drone to it’s fleet of unmanned aircraft. It will be the school’s largest drone yet, and it will be used to develop a sensor package that can detect gas emissions from oil and gas pipelines and processing facilities. The three year grant totals $539,000 and some of that money will purchase one a drone called a Seahunter. It has a 16-foot wingspan. and a 100-lb payload capacity. That is significantly larger the 25 lbs carried by the RS-16., which is currently the largest drone in the university’s fleet. Dr. Ahmed Mahdy, director of innovation in computing research, says the additional capacity of the Seahunter is necessary to carry the various types of sensors needed to gather the kind of information required by the nation science foundation grant. Mahdy says, “Some of the imagery sensors will be optical just like you know your camera your digital cameras as well as infra and spectral type of camera and so that will be in conjunction with other air quality sensors that measure methane, helium, carbon […]
