Powell Sees Int’l UAS Center at SMHEC
The vision is simple and breath taking: Make Southern Maryland the Global Capital of Technological Innovation Related to Unmanned Aviation Systems by developing a UAS Center at SMHEC.
It isn’t at all far-fetched, said Mel Powell, Executive Director of the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center. Speaking last week to his fellow Lexington Park Rotarians, Mr. Powell presented a compelling vision of global excellence in UAS research already seeded in California, MD.
A third academic building will soon be under construction at the SMHEC campus next to the Walter Francis Duke Regional Airport in California, MD. Even if the University System of Maryland had not announced its intentions to invest in a bricks and mortar presences on the campus, this building had been approved, Mr. Powell said.
Current plans for the new classroom, developed prior to the USM decision, will give SMHEC another 17 seminar rooms, a lab, a new engineering room, a meeting space for 400 people, and 11 offices.”
There are already 38 degree programs available at the SMHEC campus, a wide array of education, engineering and technology degrees from bachelor completion through doctorate degrees. This includes mechanical engineering and other offerings from the University of Maryland.
However, the addition of USM has significantly upped the game. Mr. Powell sees nothing short of turning this research center into “the global capital of technological innovation.” This will become, he said, a “new UAS Center of Excellence.”
The new building will add 15,000 square feet of laboratories and research capabilities to the campus. The plans as they stand include an indoor flight facility, a circulating water channel, a networked autonomous decisions lab (semi-autonomous coordination of networked robotic systems), a ground robotics lab and a computer visualization simulator environment. However, Mr. Powell said, the state is now looking at adding space, in particular for the incubation of new technologies into commercial projects.
The USM commitment to construction at SMHEC already helped secure a just-opened unmanned automated systems test site at the Walter Francis Duke Regional Airport right next door to the campus. The affiliation is likely to leverage an expansion of the designed building, Mr. Powell said. Similarly, he said, the growing attention to unmanned automated systems and other research at the SMHEC campus, plus the new test site, could ratchet the effort into a worldwide innovation UAS Center at SMHEC.
Mr. Powell recommends an Institute be created to best develop a UAS Research Center of Excellence that will encourage and accommodate top-level research and draw top-level researchers, instructors and students worldwide. The model intertwines education, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
According to Mr. Powell the UAS Research Center of Excellence would conduct “research that drives technology, innovation, commercialization, and the creation and retention of businesses and jobs in Southern Maryland and the State of Maryland.”
