Donor-funded upgrades to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s unmanned aerial systems trailer will streamline operations for cadets and other researchers.

The upgrades will make the trailer more efficient and more usable wherever it is parked.

The planned upgrades include:

• A weather station for accurate forecasts near the UAS trailer.
• Starlink internet access.
• More monitors to track collected data.
• Better drone detection with new cameras.

The capstone team of 2nd Lt. John Costello ’26 and 2nd Lt. Payton Nunn ’26 worked in the trailer during the 2025-26 academic year — before the upgrades — and they are excited to see how the improvements shape future cadet research.

They say each of the upgrades will help provide a solution to issues that hampered their own capstone research.

The on-site weather station will be more accurate than weather apps in providing wind reports, they say. That will help protect the drones and improve flight planning.

Internet access will allow the research team to pull real-time map data, which is required for the interface and radar suite they developed. They also will be able to relay their data to other team members in the department team lab for data analysis.

“In previous years, cadets used pre-loaded maps to get around not having internet access,” Costello says. With Starlink, their system will be able to access map data for any location they operate in.

Extra monitors will provide a fuller picture of their data without toggling between screens.

“You would think three laptop screens would be enough,” Nunn says, “but we have multiple radars up, we’ve got the drone hunter system up, and we’ve got all of our in-house scripts running. We very quickly had very limited real estate on what we could see.”

Finally, new cameras will improve drone detection and countermeasures. They also can help researchers verify that a detected drone is “good to shoot down,” Costello says.

“We’re super grateful for all the donor support we’ve received. The equipment isn’t cheap, and it allow cadets to really take what they’ve learned in the first three years and apply that to operationally relevant problems,” Costello says.