I was invited to exhibit and talk about drone technology and research with some high school students visiting Oregon State University today. They were blown away with how small some of the technology has become and had a lot of questions about capabilities. Some of them were creeped out by the fact that some of the small drones had cameras, but were intrigued about how OSU is using drones for research.

Drones I exhibited included a MikroKopter hexacopter, 3DR Solo, DJI Phantom 3 Advanced, Blade Glimpse, Cheerson CX-10 and the World’s Smallest Quadcopter® – the Aerius quadcopter from Aerix.

Here is an interesting fact about the Mikrokopter I exhibited. This multirotor was used to do research on nursery tree inventory and crop management. For more information, you can read this news article from The Oregonian: “Oregon nurseries explore unmanned drone technology to monitor fields”.  You can also watch this Youtube presentation by one of the researchers (and my eXtension UAS in Agriculture Learning Network colleague), Dr. “Jim Robbins: UAS for Plant Count Inventory”.