{"id":78945,"date":"2025-07-20T21:10:22","date_gmt":"2025-07-20T21:10:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/78945\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T21:10:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T21:10:22","slug":"st-marys-student-creates-data-to-help-drones-fly-longer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/78945\/","title":{"rendered":"St. Mary’s student creates data to help drones fly longer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Riojas clearly remembers the day he bumped into a particular building at St. Mary\u2019s University a few years back. He was taking a self-guided campus tour, he said, when he suddenly saw a big, blue, metal structure with a word in its name that sparked curiosity: Unmanned.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was the Unmanned Aerial Systems Lab<\/a>, a lab built by the university in 2021 to incorporate drones and drone-related research into their Science, Engineering and Technology curriculum.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Riojas, now a 22-year-old computer engineering major at St. Mary\u2019s, knew he wanted to work in this lab. What he didn\u2019t know is that only a couple of years later he would be developing machine learning models \u2014 an AI subfield that seeks to train algorithms to make predictions based on data and statistical methods.<\/p>\n

His research seeks to help keep unmanned aerial vehicles up in the air longer, in hopes these can one day be deployed for lengthy survey or search missions, like those happening after the floods in Kerr County<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m pretty sure you have seen on social media, <\/strong>\u2018Why wouldn\u2019t they deploy drones for search and rescue missions?\u2019\u201d Riojas said. \u201cAnd the simple answer is that they can\u2019t last long in the air due to power issues.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engineers at St. Mary\u2019s University helped secure a grant in October 2024 totaling more than $340,000 from the U.S. Department of Defense to purchase autonomous vehicles, including flying drones and ground vehicles for this and other research projects.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"St. Mary\u2019s University senior Joshua Rojas smiles back at his professors while explining how he uses a software to map airflow from a fan in the Unmanned Aerial System Lab at St. Mary\u2019s University. Credit: Blaine Young for the San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

\u201cThis grant enables us to do research on autonomous vehicles, AI and overall security,\u201d said Wenbin Luo, Ph.D., professor of computer engineering at St. Mary\u2019s. \u201cIn addition, we also want to use it as a teaching platform, so we can use what we learn and pass the knowledge on to our students.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Luo and other professors and students focus on research to keep autonomous vehicles safe from cyberattacks, the question for Riojas became: How do you help keep these machines up in the air longer?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only solution to having a system that can stay aloft in the air for a long period of time is a sailplane, because they use the wind to stay aloft for a longer period of time,\u201d Riojas said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That meant he had to figure out how to teach the machines to read air currents, seek air patterns and use <\/strong>those patterns like a bird would,<\/strong> to stay in flight without expending too much energy. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn this case, Joshua is creating data,\u201d said Ben Abbott, the engineering lecturer overseeing Riojas\u2019 work in the lab. \u201cHe is trying to create a machine learning \u2014 in this age of AI that we\u2019re in \u2014 that can become as smart as the bird, smarter than humans.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"St. Mary\u2019s University senior Joshua Rojas (left) poses for a photo with St. Mary\u2019s faculty members Ben Abbott and Wenbin Luo. Credit: Blaine Young for the San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

The U.S. Department of Defense<\/a> offers grants to higher education institutions to support research that can be critical to national security. In fiscal year 2025, the agency spent more than $5 billion on grants and awarded more than 2,000 new grants, according to data released by USAspending<\/a>. <\/p>\n

In this case the grant was secured by St. Mary\u2019s to help support cybersecurity research, specifically how to keep unmanned vehicles safe, but having this equipment offers a wide array of other research possibilities, Abbott and Luo said. <\/p>\n

In his research Riojas created data by reading air patterns himself, such as the direction of a current, the velocity of it, and combining this with how a drone would react to a specific current; for example, where in the particular current would a drone fly in a more stable way? What data points could he gather from even the most minuscule movement caused by air fluctuations or change in position?\u00a0<\/p>\n

To do that, he attached motion caption markers to a flying drone and asked it to follow a vehicle on the ground with a fan attached to it using sensors. He then recorded the data it was receiving from the drone\u2019s movement including its exact location within that rising air current.<\/p>\n

\"\"Rojas shows the drone he uses to simulate and collect data for his AI project. Credit: Blaine Young for the San Antonio Report<\/p>\n

\u201cI just found it very interesting how accurate the machine learning models that you build can be,\u201d Riojas said. \u201cIf that drone is at the very center of that rising air, then it\u2019ll tell you that it\u2019s at the center. But if it\u2019s at the edge of it, then it\u2019ll tell you because it\u2019s going to be looking at the roll, pitch and yaw.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his professor looking attentively, Riojas controlled only the ground robot to move around the flight area in the lab, blowing air as it roamed. A small drone then followed its movement closely, seeking to stay near the center of the rising air as it gathered data with its movements.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With this research Riojas and his professors hope to one day inform many other unmanned aerial vehicles how to stay in the air longer and make a difference in potentially life-saving missions.<\/p>\n

This is also one example of why Abbott sees working with AI as a requirement in his courses. He wants to provide his students hands-on experience so that they learn to use AI as a tool to solve real-life problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, what we\u2019re learning here \u2026 is how to use the AI,\u201d Abbott said. \u201cI mean, Joshua, he doesn\u2019t know it yet, but he can compete with anyone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joshua Riojas clearly remembers the day he bumped into a particular building at St. Mary\u2019s University a few…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":78946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5133],"tags":[691,5229,10414,14461,734,8734,7202,7203,54439,358,3187,25731,67,586,132,5230,54440,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-78945","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-antonio","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-america","10":"tag-autonomous-vehicles","11":"tag-cyberattack","12":"tag-cybersecurity","13":"tag-higher-education","14":"tag-san-antonio","15":"tag-sanantonio","16":"tag-st-marys-university","17":"tag-texas","18":"tag-tx","19":"tag-u-s-department-of-defense","20":"tag-united-states","21":"tag-united-states-of-america","22":"tag-unitedstates","23":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","24":"tag-unmanned-areal-systems","25":"tag-us","26":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114887618018277963","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}