Robot sky patrol: the military's remotely piloted planes make ideal spies--but each one costs millions. Stanley Herwitz thinks off-the-shelf technology can make aerial sensing affordable for everyone. (Demo).

Technology Review (Cambridge, Mass.), February, 2003

Wake up and sense the coffee. One day last September, that was the job of a research team led by Clark University earth scientist Stanley Herwitz, a proponent of low-cost wireless aerial imaging for the masses. Rising well before dawn, Herwitz's team rolled Pathfinder Plus, a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) from NASA, onto a U.S. Navy runway on the island of Kauai, HI, and launched the plane into the sunrise. They guided the craft by radio to a height of 6.4 kilometers over the rapidly ripening fields of Kauai Coffee, the largest U.S. coffee plantation. There, commercial cameras under the UAV's wing snapped digital photos of the fields at both optical and infrared frequencies and transmitted them in near-real time to image specialists who used them to identify the...