News, Highlights, and Events
[May 5, 2013] RECUV played a significant role in the Colorado effort to secure one of six Federal Aviation Administration test sites for unmanned aircraft systems. The effort was endorsed by U.S. Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet, Gov. John Hickenlooper and five of Colorado's members of the U.S. House of Representatives.
[July 25, 2012] Recent RECUV graduate Dr. Jack Elston received a National Science Foundation Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship titled "Improved In Situ Thermodynamic Sampling of Severe Storms with Unmanned Aircraft Systems Through Improved Wind Estimation and Energy Harvesting.” This fellowship will allow Jack to continue to work with RECUV while expanding the concepts and capabilities he developed during his dissertation research.
[July 1, 2012] Associate Professor Eric Frew takes over as the Director of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles.
[May, 2012] Aerospace Engineering Science Assistant Professor Ryan Starkey joins RECUV. Ryan brings a new research topic to the center in the area of Advanced Propulsion Systems. Ryan's research interests include Hypersonic flows, high speed propulsion, multidisciplinary analysis and design optimization, vehicle design, propulsion/airframe integration, computational chemistry, systems integration, parallel processing, and computational aerodynamics.
[April, 2012] RECUV student Holly Borowski has received a 2012 NASA Aeronautics Scholarship Graduate Award.
[March 1, 2012] The Center for Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS), a joint effort between RECUV and Brigham Young University, became an official operating center in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) program. The objective of C-UAS is to bring together university researchers and industry partners to conduct research on challenging problems facing the UAS industry.
[Jan 2012] The paper titled "The Collaborative Colorado–Nebraska Unmanned Aircraft System Experiment" by RECUV members and collaborators is featured on the cover of the January 2012 Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society.
[Sept. 8, 2011] Maciej Stachura, Professor Brian Argrow and Associate Professor Eric Frew travelled to Washington D.C. to present the Tempest Unmanned Aircraft as part of the Hazards on the Hill Event on Sept. 7, 2011. Approximately 350 people attended the Hazards Event, including Senators Bill Nelson (FL), Michael Bennet (CO), and Jack Reed (RI), and Congressman Bill Flores (TX). [Video of Eric Frew describing the Tempest UAS].
[Dec. 6, 2010] Brian Argrow and Ryan Starkey collaborated with the Sierra Nevada Corporation to design and build a dynamically scaled model of the Dream Chaser vehicle, which had its first successful test flight at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center the week of December 6, 2010. Dream Chaser is designed to carry up to seven people to the International Space Station and back. [Episode of the Daily Planet on Discovery Channel Canada featuring the team.]
[June 11, 2010] June 10, 2010 we intercepted a tornadic supercell north of Limon, CO [Video with onboard footage].
[May 7, 2010] The RECUV team made the first interception of a "supercell" thunderstorm by an unmanned aircraft system on May 6 [Flight Review]. Our Tempest unmanned aircraft flew for 44 minutes, covering roughly eight miles along a gust front south of the thunderstorm in northwestern Kansas.
[May 1, 2010] Professor Brian Argrow and Eric Frew led the UAS Team of RECUV faculty, students, and researchers participating in the VORTEX2 field deployment from May 1 to June 15, 2010, the largest effort ever made to understand tornadoes. The UAS team is composed of RECUV faculty, students, and researchers partnered with meteorology faculty and students led by Assistant Professor Adam Houston from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Eric Frew recently received an NSF Career Award for his research on Mothership / Daughtership Architectures for In Situ Science by Robotic Sensor Networks.
Kristine Larson was selected as one of the “50 Global Navigation Satellite Systems Leaders to Watch.” Her recent work was also highlighted in the ScienceNow online magazine and as an NSF Highlights feature.