Before his current academic position, Hunsaker was a design engineer for Scaled Composites, the California company behind Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane. “There are thousands of different missions people are coming up with for drones,” said Doug Hunsaker, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Utah State University.
Now a free online 3-D aircraft design software package is helping drone startup companies and university researchers design unmanned fixed-wing-and soon rotorcraft-aircraft to support this revolution. In a March 2016 report, Goldman Sachs estimated that total global spending on unmanned aircraft in the commercial market will reach $100 billion in the next five years, with firms increasingly providing hardware, flight and data services to the construction, agriculture, energy, utilities and mining industries as well as emergency responders, real estate agents, insurance companies and media firms.Įngineers are working furiously to create new platforms able to fly even more economically, operate in difficult environments and enable new applications like asset tracking.
Like the Internet and GPS before them, drones have evolved beyond military applications to become powerful business tools.
