On the pilot’s computer screen, planted at ground level a few yards from the airport runway in Grand Forks, N.D., the data streaming across the display tracked an airplane at 1,300 feet above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 150 miles per hour.
To the pilot’s right, a sensor operator was aiming a camera on the plane to pan, tilt and zoom in a search among the houses on the ground for people who had been reported missing.
On his screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire between the houses.
“There they are,†Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student, said in a flat tone that seemed out of place with a successful rescue mission.
In fact, no one was missing; the entire exercise used imaginary props and locales, Matthew L. Wald reports in The New York Times on Monday. Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The university, the first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviatio, is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.
“The sky’s going to be dark with these things,†said Chris Anderson, a former editor of Wired, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter â€" about 7,500 â€" as the United States military flies in total.
The burst of activity in remotely operated planes stems from the confluence of two factors: electronics and communications gear has become dirt cheap, enabling the conversion of hobbyist radio-controlled planes into sophisticated platforms for surveillance, and the Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.
