Drone technician program at CSN gets ready to fly

A small grant was one of the final pieces Arthur Eggers needed to start a drone technician program at CSN.

“It was the key to the program and allowed me to do it using existing curriculum,” said Eggers, who is the Unmanned Aviation Systems Program academic lead at the College of Southern Nevada.

The recent grant, $195,925 from the Governor’s Office of Science, Innovation and Technology, is helping Eggers buy equipment. The CSN program addresses a need not being met by current drone-related programs, he said.

At the high end, he said, there are the bachelor’s and graduate-level robotics-engineering programs in which students learn to design drone systems from the ground up. While those programs are great, Eggers said, they’re not for everyone.

On the low end there are courses geared for hobbyists that can teach people how to fly drones in a few days. “But if (those students) run into problems, with that course, they have no idea how to fix it or how to approach it,” he said.

Eggers said his program targeted the middle ground to teach students the practical technical skills needed to support the drones used in commercial applications.

“They’re going to have a feel for commercial aspects of the industry,” Eggers said. “The one thing we didn’t want to create was an environment where we are training hobbyists. We are looking for students to be knowledgeable about products the industry will actually use.”

Students will learn fabrication and engineering skills to build and repair drones, as well as programming skills to