The Department of Oil and Gas Engineering and Welding, which this academic year presents a new educational program – «Unmanned Aerial Vehicles» from specialty No. 134 «Aviation and Rocket-Space Engineering», received four drones for educational needs from the Polish Micromacro Institute Foundation free of charge.
Among the transferred drones there are three expensive Phantom 4 RTKs, which are probably the most compact and most accurate for mapping at low altitude. The price of one such drone is about seven thousand dollars.
Olesia Maksymovych, head of the Department of Oil and Gas Engineering and Welding, Lviv Polytechnic National University, said that the Micromacro Institute Foundation saw potential in the development of scientific relations with Polytechnic.
«While monitoring information about what’s new in the world related to drones, I came across the Warsaw foundation that conducts Droniada. This is a technology competition where teams demonstrate their knowledge of robotics, mechatronics, avionics, informatics, and perform various tasks related to drone control and processing of received information. I established relations with the organizers, they saw the potential in our University and, in order to support us, first gave us one drone, and then three more», says Olesia Maksymovych.
Slawomir Koselinski, who is the head of the program board of the Micromacro Institute Foundation, noted that this organization popularizes new technologies, in particular drones.
«The Foundation emphasizes the promotion of strategic thinking about the state, society and economy both on a micro scale – at the level of a local initiative group, and on a macro scale – at the national and global levels. Professor Maksymovych presented convincing arguments why we should support the development of drones at Polytechnic. As part of the «Drones to the East» campaign, which was launched back in March, collecting and handing over drones to Ukrainian volunteers, activists, and the army to help defeat the Russian aggressor, we also handed over four drones to Lviv Polytechnic. After all, it is important for us that as many students, engineers, and young scientists as possible learn to use drones in various directions, in particular for monitoring the area during the reconstruction of everything destroyed. Therefore, we are creating a new bridge of cooperation between our Foundation and Polytechnic, because this University is well-known in Poland, and the new program on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is very promising», emphasized Slawomir Koselinski, adding that the drones, handed over to Lviv Polytechnic, arrived in Poland from the Australian company Proppeller from Texas (USA), where their branch is located, and then to Lviv.
It was also agreed that next year the Lviv Polytechnic team will take part in Droniad and represent the University at these technical competitions.
In addition, they are developing a new grant project on monitoring the state of gas and oil pipelines in Ukraine with the help of drones, which Polytechnic plans to implement together with the Polish Foundation.
We should add that the Micromacro Institute Foundation was founded thirteen years ago, and during this time it has organized dozens of conferences, scientific and technical competitions and popular demonstrations of the capabilities of modern technologies.
