AN ANTONIO — With sensors covering his head, University of Texas at San Antonio graduate student Mauricio Merino concentrated hard. A camouflage-colored drone hovered with a soft hum in the middle of a campus research lab.
For now, though, it was fellow graduate student Prasanna Kolar who stood nearby to operate the unmanned aerial vehicle, also called a UAV, with a cellphone app — gently commanding it left and right.
The ultimate goal: Create a process to control the movements of groups of drones with nothing more than a thought, said Daniel Pack, chairman of UTSA’s electrical and computer engineering department.