The Navy is hoping to one day run a huge chunk of its fleet on biofuels. So the Navy’s advanced researchers — and their partners at the U.S. Department of Agriculture — are turning to a tiny robotic helicopter to help them figure out which crop they might be able to convert into their fuel of the future.
The experiment is taking place over 35,000 acres of Maui soil, on the fields of Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, the state’s largest commercial sugar plantation. That’s the site of a $10 million, five-year gamble to test which of plantation’s crops might work as grow-your-jetfuel. The drone helicopter will track every temperature fluctuation and sprouting bud emerging into the Hawaiian sun......
.....Nevertheless, the Office of Naval Research and the Agriculture Department are wondering whether Maui’s mix of plants, tropical sun, and nutrient-rich soil can produce a bumper crop of clean, renewable energy. Enter the Leptron corporation’s tiny drone helicopter, the Avenger. It’s about to be the Navy’s robotic horticulturist in Hawaii.
The Department of Agriculture recently bought an Avenger — not to be confused with the next-generation Predator drone — so its thermal imaging cameras can gather “small plot specific data,” particularly about crop temperature. The department wants a drone instead of a manned helicopter so it can keep the Avenger hovering over the patch of farmland and taking pictures longer than a human being could handle. The idea is that the Avenger’s persistent stare will alert researchers to any problems with the crops — including jatropha, sweet sorghum, and sugar cane — before the entire experiment is jeopardized. The team figures that Hawaii is an ideal venue for the experiement: it’s a high-fertility environment that’s already home to the Pacific Fleet. “A perfect storm of opportunity,” is how the Navy’s top energy official described Hawaii in 2010......
.....But the first lookout for whether grow-your-own fuel is even viable will be the diminutive, svelte Avenger, whose main rotor is merely six feet in diameter. In addition to optional remote-control or programmable autonomous flight options, it comes with a pair of video goggles, which Leptron calls a “Personal Media Viewer,” to give a person below a drone’s eye view. Watching the grass grow was never this captivating.
