Posted: 4-29-2009
UF/IFAS graduate student wins NSF graduate research fellowship award
A UF School of Forest Resources and Conservation graduate student has won a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship award.
John Perry, who will begin his doctoral studies in geomatics at UF this fall, will earn a $30,000 annual stipend, for a maximum of three years.
Perry, 24, said he plans to spend the money on his research, which explores lightweight, unmanned aerial vehicles for civilian uses.
Lightweight UAVs are small airplanes that typically weigh less than 20 pounds and can take off, fly and land — without a human pilot.
Among their many potential uses are conducting migratory bird population studies, evaluating the effectiveness of aquatic vegetation control, and rapidly identifying weak or failing levees, Perry said.
His work, in particular, focuses on developing remote sensing payloads that can fit on hand-launchable UAVs, and algorithms for processing the data.
“Essentially, this means I work out ways to take aerial photographs and turn them into maps, such as you would find on Google Earth,” he wrote in an e-mail.
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