NAMPA, Idaho — At the College of Western Idaho, students are learning to navigate the skies with drone technology that's reshaping industries across the economy.
The college's Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) program is designed to prepare students for a wide range of career opportunities in the rapidly expanding drone industry.
"There are very few industries out in the world that aren't being affected by drones in one way, shape, or form," said Tim Schuh, Department Chair of Drafting, Engineering, and UAS. "We're trying to keep our program as open as possible so that when students leave here, they're ready to enter whatever field they're interested in."
The program exposes students to various drone sizes and applications. One larger drone, originally designed to carry cinema cameras, can be repurposed for precision agriculture.
"If it's designed to carry tanks for the chemicals, they could go out using GPS information, head out to specific locations in the field, just distribute a specific amount of chemical on the field, and then move on," said Steve Porterfield, an instructor in the program. "It's a way to get precise application and save time, money, chemicals, and all that."
Students also learn mapping techniques using drones equipped with specialized cameras.
"The process for doing that looks very similar to agriculture — what they would be doing is if they're doing crop analysis...they can do essentially what they're doing here in a grid pattern and as they're flying they're gathering infrared imagery that can be used for analyzing crops," said Porterfield.
For student Jesus Trejo, the program's versatility is what attracted him.
"Another thing I learned was that you can read the infrared from the plants. So you can kind of get like a general scan of your crop's health to know what areas of the field may need work on and things like that," said Trejo. "But I mainly got into the class because I'm just interested in how much applicability the whole industry has. I mean, you can use it for a whole lot of things."
As drone technology continues to advance, the College of Western Idaho's program aims to stay ahead of industry trends.
"At the end of the day, there are very few industries that aren't going to be disrupted in one way or another by drones," said Schuh.
This story was initially reported by a journalist and has been, in part, converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
