By Kirk Ladendorf
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Glenn Lightsey envisions a world where hundreds of small, unmanned aircraft fly overhead and perform all sorts of tasks, from border surveillance to advanced communications.
Lightsey, an aerospace engineering associate professor at the University of Texas , has patented a guidance system that might help make such miniature drones a reality.

Glenn Lightsey will be among 14 University of Texas researchers making presentations at the 'Ready to Commercialize' conference. A UT-built space satellite that uses sensor and guidance system technology he developed, will be launched by the government in 2007.

Lightsey will be among 14 UT researchers making presentations at the school's "Ready to Commercialize" conference Thursday at the Four Seasons Hotel.

The event is the fourth put on by UT in the past three years. The format has been changed this year to encourage more interaction between inventors and the investors. Venture capital firms from both coasts will be attending, including In-Q-Tel, the independent strategic venture fund that identifies innovative technologies to support the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Lightsey's invention is tied to his involvement with a group of UT engineering students who won a contest in 2005 to build a low-cost, lightweight space satellite. The competition was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, NASA and the American Institute of Aeronautics.
The UT team had to devise a small, affordable system to guide the satellite in relation to a global positioning system.

"The competition forced us to develop new kinds of sensors," Lightsey said. "We couldn't use the sensors available because they were too big, too power-hungry or too expensive." The government is scheduled to launch the satellite developed by the UT team next year.

Lightsey has continued to work on the sensor and guidance system, and he thinks it would be well-suited to work in drones, which are small, unmanned airplanes. Drones are commonly used by the military to find and sometimes destroy enemy targets.

Lightsey said he thinks his system could enable a new class of affordable drones for commercial, as well as military, uses.
"We are looking for one or more commercial partners to turn the product into something that is rugged and can be marketed to government and commercial customers," Lightsey says.

Lightsey and the other 13 inventors at the conference will make two-minute presentations to the larger group, followed by more in-depth presentations to smaller groups of investors who want more detailed information. Their inventions represent some of UT's newest research discoveries or areas about which potential investors have inquired. In all, UT has about 1,000 technical researchers. "The university is this huge research enterprise, and this event is one mechanism to connect investors to inventors and entrepreneurs," said Neil Iscoe, the school's director of technology commercialization.
Lightsey says commercialization is a way of getting research discoveries to have a larger impact.

"Inventors want to see their ideas manufactured," he said. "They want to see people using it and seeing it benefit society. This is a step on that path for me. I don't want to work in a lab and have no one even know what I am working on. This conference increases the likelihood that something will happen to commercialize it."

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