There’s no one way to fly a drone – at least according to Dr. Anthony Comer, Oklahoma State University-Tulsa mechanical and aerospace engineering faculty member and the director of the Simulation to Flight Applied Research Lab (S2FAR) in the Helmerich Research Center.

As explained by Comer, there is no standard control scheme to fly an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), more commonly called drones. With a wide range of sizes, uses and capabilities, each type of drone flies a bit differently. But in a drone-filled future, having a standard set of controls for any given drone will be increasingly important.

“I know that the end goal is autonomy — but at the end of the day, there's probably a human in the loop somewhere,” Comer said. “If there's a human who might have to take over, how can we make sure that they're ready to take over at any moment and safely pilot?”

Escape the simulation and build it

According to Comer, government agencies such as NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense are increasingly interested in next-generation vehicles that have the ability take off vertically like a helicopter and then fly forward like a plane. This valuable technology could solve a lot of problems involved in take-off and landing, but it also makes controlling the vehicle remotely rather tricky. Luckily, this is a field of interest for Comer, who has a background in flight dynamics and controls.

In his S2FAR Lab, Comer and his students make prototypes and scale models of these types of UAS vehicles for a variety of clients.

“Coming to OSU-Tulsa, one of the things I wanted to do was get out of the realm of just doing simulations and actually build it out and test it,” he said. “It looks great in this virtual world, where everything's kind of perfect. But let's take it out of the mold and go fly it.”

Can we create standardized drone controls?

Some of the recent partnerships Comer and his lab have forged involve exploring the more human factors of flying drones, such as attempting to get pilots in a state of mind where they don’t even know what vehicle they’re flying.

“If you can learn how to fly a generic-responding vehicle, then you'll be able to fly them all,” he said. “That's the goal that I'm pursuing in terms of flight controls. Something almost like a car, where a driver can drive most cars the same way.”

The S2FAR lab is actively pursuing leads to invent solutions for these problems, such as creating a standard certification pathway through a tool used by NASA. They’re also currently working with a company to create smaller-scale versions of vehicles to train the company’s pilots on before they get behind the controls of the real thing.

How do you fly multiple drones at once?

With a large variety of vehicles and applications involved in drone flight, there’s a lot of factors to research and consider, and a lot of new problems to solve. Along these lines, one of Comer’s Ph.D. students is currently researching how to teach pilots to not just one drone at a time — but over a dozen.

“He’s particularly interested in how you teach pilots to fly swarms — so if you have 15 drones flying around, how do you control all of them? And what changes when you're just flying one?”

In the meantime, companies and organizations don’t have to wait for the future to arrive to get their hands on cutting-edge drone tech.

“If you're looking for a place to get involved with vertical lift at all, come to the Helmerich Research Center,” Comer said. “We have the expertise here.”

To get connected to the S2FAR lab, contact Comer’s team at s2far.com.