Mike Piccini an Advanced Ceramics Research technician, assembles a Manta. The unmanned radio-controlled aircraft has lots of military applications, but now it's being used in other areas, such as a recent air-pollution study in an Indian Ocean chain of islands.

Benjie Sanders / ARIZONA DAILY STAR

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Unmanned aerial vehicles: They're not just for the military anymore.

Equipped with cameras or a variety of sensors, UAVs manufactured in Tucson are already, or may soon be, used to study air and water pollution, follow whales to avoid collisions, find fish to catch, detect harmful fungus on wine grapes and monitor the condition of other crops, even entire forests.

Tucson's Advanced Ceramics Research has three relatively small UAVs in its line of products. Company spokesman Woody Berzins said the company has already produced at least 200 copies of its Manta UAV, most for military applications. Berzins said he couldn't discuss specifics of how or where the military versions were deployed.

But three Mantas were recently used in a joint air pollution study by the Scripps Institute, National Science Foundation, NASA and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean.

Mark Patterson, ACR's director of technology and chief instrument scientist, said the company's three UAVs were able to do a study that had been tried unsuccessfully using manned fixed-wing aircraft.

The idea was to collect information about light penetration, particulate pollution and water-droplet size simultaneously at three different altitudes.

"The skies over the Indian Ocean visibly bear the imprint of human activities in South Asia," said Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan during a TV documentary about the project.

It was the subject of an April 18 Public Broadcasting Service "NOVA" program, "Dimming the Sun." During the show, Ramanathan said the Maldives project proved lightweight UAVs had a strong future in environmental work.

"I have no hesitation predicting in about five years from now that there will be hundreds of these aircraft (UAVs), even possibly thousands of UAVs, with miniaturized instruments . . . to probe how we are modifying the planet, polluting the planet. And my hope is these UAVs will provide an early warning for disasters before they occur."

His assessment is in line with the late March predictions of Frost & Sullivan, a Palo Alto, Calif., research firm that recently predicted UAV industry revenues will grow from $2.14 billion in 2005 to $17 billion in 2011.

Founded by University of Arizona scientists, ACR has about 80 employees and has its headquarters at 3292 E. Hemisphere Loop near East Valencia and South Palo Verde roads. The company also operates a manufacturing plant on Tohono O'odham land as part of a joint venture with the San Xavier Development Authority.

Most of the media attention on UAVs has been in coverage of military applications, such as the large, missile-equipped Predator robot plane that has been used to track and fire on terrorists in the Middle East.

Military applications, Berzins said, are still evolving. One very promising use is having trios of fully automated UAVs accompany military trucks or convoys. Berzins said stateside testing of the company's system in the Southwest showed that one of the planes could fly ahead of the lead truck, sending back images of hazards, another could "loiter" over trucks, watching the sides and immediate area, and a third could cover approaches from the convoy's rear.

He said the software developed for the system automatically put the UAVs into flying a box pattern over the same ground when the truck stopped.

There are limitations on the expansion of civilian use of UAVs, particularly in the U.S. since 9/11, said Berzins. The Federal Aviation Administration, he said, has well-founded concerns about the use of UAVs in proximity to other aircraft or urban areas. Current FAA rules require a licensed pilot be in real-time control of a UAV operating in areas used by other aircraft, or in populated areas, Berzins said.

TECH FILE