The Federal Aviation Administration today gave a major publicity and resource boost to the ASSURE initiative, an interstate research and development initiative focused on exploring the potential that modern drones have from a standpoint of emergency applications and services.
More specifically, an FAA grant covering $3.3 million in funding has just been approved by the federal agency as part of the government’s latest attempt at boosting American drone technologies, a field in which the U.S. has been losing quite hard to Chinese pioneers over the last half a decade or so. The newly disclosed grant will be evenly divided among education, staff training and retraining programs, and some general-purpose research concerning pretty much every type of emergency services out there.
The ASSIRE coalition is helmed by the state of Mississippi , i.e. its leading scientists and engineers from the Mississippi State University. Besides the aforementioned figure, the MSU just recently secured another $130,000 in federal granted disaster preparedness funds. All that’s left to do now is come up with some meaningful innovation concerning emergency drone applications, which is easier said than done, naturally.
Between a rigorous approval process concerning any aircraft and the aggressive competition from other parts of the world, the MSU’s best and brightest certainly have their work cut out for them.