The University of Texas at El Paso is gearing up to build drone tech

Terry Gerton The University of Texas at El Paso just got a federal grant to expand your drone program. Before we jump into the particulars, tell us what you’re doing already and how this grant might change what you are working on.

Shery Welsh Yeah, of course. Generally on a day-to-day, the Aerospace Center UAS team runs a very — we’re able to run very disciplined cycles of training delivery to soldiers or students or industry. We conduct flight operations out at our Tornillo site and we work on applied research and actually support local law enforcement and operational test support as well. We also train people to earn their drone pilot license. That’s part of the part 107 academics and flight training that we already provide to various types of people. We build standardized mission scenarios as well, everything from like planning, execution, after action reviews. We collect all that data and then use that to improve our procedures and our training materials.

Terry Gerton You mentioned those remote test sites in Tornillo, and you have one in Fabens, right? So as you think about upgrading those facilities, what sort of capacity will you be looking to build?

Shery Welsh We’ll have so much more capacity with this $2 million congressional funding, first of all. So we’re going to be doing a lot of infrastructure upgrades, power computing, so we need a lot more computer power, networking power, because we need networking actually for the beyond visual line of sight, which we will talk about in a little bit, and I’ll explain more about that. That’s essentially just means you can fly drones remotely. Without having to be there on site and watch the drones fly. So we’ll be setting up classrooms at our Fabens site. We’ll have a radar and we’ll also have a radar with upgraded capabilities out at our Tornillo site. So the capacity that that will bring us is enormous, primarily because not only does it increase our capabilities, but it actually will drastically increase our throughput, meaning we can do a lot more training. Of course, capability increase equates to we can do a much more robust training for federal law enforcement, for companies, startup companies that come to us. But the throughput is the key there. This will allow us to have a staff and we’re actually have seven critical positions that need to get filled. We’re going to fill those with students, actually train the students, and fill those with the students. So of course that makes my heart happy. And we’ll be able to actually throughput a lot more training from the local Fort Bliss soldiers to soldiers anywhere across the U.S., people who are just wanting to come in and take training and our own students, of course, to be able take that training as well.

Terry Gerton Sounds like you’ve got a lot of demand for the services that you operate.

Shery Welsh We do. Already we do, yes.

Terry Gerton Well, let’s go back to that beyond visual line of sight waiver that you mentioned, because it’s not a very common waiver. So you’re one of, I think, 12 places that have it. How does that change the kind of training that you’re able to do there at UTEP?

Shery Welsh The short answer, to help people understand, is… it takes us from being more in a lab environment, even though we’re out in the field, it takes this from being in a more lab environment to an operationally relevant environment. So we can now conduct research and training in a way that looks real world, looks like real world operations. Beyond visual line of sight authorization allows us our UAS operations where the pilot is not required to maintain direct visual contact with the aircraft at all times, like I mentioned a few minutes ago. So now with that, we can execute much longer range routes because you don’t have to be there on the site, which is really great because our Tornillo site, with that beyond visual line-of-sight waiver, we have 87 square miles. To remotely fly drones out there. We can do much larger area mapping, larger area search and rescue, quick reaction to public safety support. Let’s see what else, Remote launch and recover from fixed sites. And fixed sites is really important because then that’s where you can have the pilot, the payload operator, the mission commander, all working together remotely at a single site. Without that, beyond visual line of sight, training and research are really very limited, which is why this $2 million is very helpful to us because now we can purchase a radar and have the upgrades necessary to be able to do the networking that we need. Without it we’d be, we are limited to short range flights with visual line of sight. So the pilot has to be on site and be able to see the aircraft at all times. And as you can imagine, you can’t go very far when you have to keep eyes on. So the visual line-of-sight where you have to be there, it’s a really important baseline but it’s not really representative, right, of how high value operational missions are executed at scale. So. And now we’re going to have that capability. So our being able to scale up like that is going to be a game changer for us.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Dr. Shery Welsh. She’s the executive director of the Aerospace Center at the University of Texas at El Paso. You all at UTEP have been building up this capacity for a while and you’ve been engaged with a lot of different kinds of demands for drone training. What is the wildest demand you’ve had that you think people might not even anticipate?

Shery Welsh Oh, that’s a good question. The wildest ask that we’ve had, I won’t be able to give you specifics, but I can tell you, we get a lot of startups that approach us, and we love working with startups. And a lot times those startups are in various stages of really trying to figure out what they want to do moving forward. And so they’re almost using us like consultants. And so I won’t mention any of the companies, of course, but some of them have, just during our brainstorming sessions, have asked a lot of interesting questions. We actually also just met with a heavy lift drone startup, where West Texas especially is very appealing because with heavy lift drones — meaning they will carry thousands, a couple of thousand pounds of cargo. Obviously they can’t fly over urban areas, they can’t fly over people, things like that. That is probably, it’s not an unusual ask, but it was an unusual startup that came to see us on the heavy lift. So a couple of thousand pound cargo payload on a drone is interesting. So, yeah.

Terry Gerton Well, we’re talking there about corporate uses for drones, but obviously drones are in the headlines from an operational perspective, operations at the southern border, current operations in the Middle East. What kind of research are you doing there at your center that helps expound on and improve collaboration, coordination in the drone space?

Shery Welsh Well, the good thing for us is our professor of research, who leads this program, is a former F-16 pilot. So he comes with a lot of credibility and a tremendous amount of real world operational experience. So luckily he has been at UTEP for several years now. So he has built in great relationships with local and federal law enforcement. Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security. So that’s really already baked into the area and the relationships that we have. It’s just without the $2 million congressional funding, we were somewhat limited. We still engaged with all those players, but we were a little limited in what we could do. So now we’ll be able to scale up and our capacity will be much greater. So, the relationships are all baked in, so that’s wonderful. And we’ll continue as we build up the program and then we’ll in parallel to go after like federal grants with all three of those departments that I talked about in OSD and work with startups and industry, being able to do anything that they need. Now we’re a little limited on being able to provide what they need, but we won’t have that limitation pretty soon.

Terry Gerton You’ve laid out a pretty compelling and aggressive research agenda there for the center. What do you see as the next operational milestones for the unmanned systems program there at UTEP?

Shery Welsh Our job is research and training, right? So that is in support of all operations, whether it’s local law enforcement, supporting the fire departments, surveilling agricultural lands, search and rescue, some of the things I mentioned at the beginning at the top of the interview. So, we provide all the training and we actually conduct applied research to be able to keep UAS operations at the tip of the spear when it comes to innovative technology. Technology is great, but to stay ahead of our adversaries and to stay head of the curve, you need research. And so we focus on the applied research to make the improvements, to change designs, to reprogram the drones to be able to have additional capabilities. So they can help the technology development and stay ahead of our adversaries. So we are a lot more capable as a country.