GRAND FORKS, North Dakota - On the pilot's screen, planted at ground level a few meters from the airport runway here, the data tracked an airplane at 400 meters above a small city on the coast, making perfect circles at 240 kilometers per hour.

To the pilot's right, a sensor operator was making a camera on the plane pan, tilt and zoom, searching among the houses for people who had been reported missing.

On the screen, cartoonlike human figures appeared in a gathering around a camp fire. "There they are," said Andrew Regenhard, the pilot and a student.

Mr. Regenhard was taking part in a training session at the University of North Dakota. The first to offer a degree program in unmanned aviation, the university is one of many academic settings, along with companies and individuals, preparing students for a brave new world in which cheap remote-controlled airplanes will be ubiquitous in civilian air space, searching for everything from the most wanted of criminal suspects to a swarm of grasshoppers devouring a crop.

"The sky's going to be dark with these things," said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine, who started the hobbyist Web site DIY Drones and now runs a company, 3D Robotics, that sells unmanned aerial vehicles and equipment. He says it is selling about as many drones every calendar quarter - about 7,500 - as the United States military flies in total.

The Federal Aviation Administration has been ordered by Congress to work out a way to integrate these aircraft into the national airspace by 2015.But Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said this year: "This fast-emerging technology is cheap and could pose a significant threat to the privacy and civil liberties of millions of Americans."

Mr. Anderson said that all the components in a drone - a fast processor, a good battery, a GPS receiver and microelectromechancial sensors - were present in an iPhone. The systems include a ground station, usually a laptop with communications gear. Some drones weigh only a few kilograms and most can fit icomfortably into the trunk of a car.

Some fans of the technology wince at the word "drone," which implies that there is no pilot. And they have grown resentful about the alarms raised over privacy issues, noting that a few city and state governments have begun banning drones even where they do not yet operate.

Experts here outline a number of uses for the planes: "precision agriculture," with tiny planes inspecting crops several times a week for the first sign of blight or insect invasion; safety missions by semiautonomous flying machines that could cruise the length of a freight train and examine the air brakes on each car; inspection operations of pipelines or power lines, and scouting out fires or car crashes.

Volunteer fire departments would provide a clear market, said Tom K. Kenville, chairman of the North Dakota chapter of the trade association, Unmanned Applications Institute, International. An unmanned vehicle, he said, was "going to beat all the cars there. If it's a chemical fire, it will tell us to stay away, or it's just some hay bales, drive slower."

Remote control equipment might even displace some human pilots, in the cockpits of cargo planes. One person could handle six cargo planes at a time.

Mr. Regenhard, 21, is building a six-rotor helicopter that will beam pictures back to the ground. Equipped with a GPS sensor and a $220 autopilot, it can be programmed to fly to a sequence of coordinates, much the way an airliner can.

To avoid midair collisions, the F.A.A. plans to have a system ready by 2015 called "sense and avoid" in which each plane in the sky, manned or unmanned, uses GPS equipment to locate itself, and sends that information to a computer on the ground that draws a map showing all targets. The computer then rebroadcasts that map to every pilot in the air - or at a computer workstation on the ground, as the case may be.

Benjamin M. Trapnell, an associate professor here, said the unmanned aircraft program was not about just learning to fly such vehicles, but also designing them, including the cameras and other sensors.

Even companies involved in conventional aviation see uses for drones. Applebee Aviation flies helicopters out of Banks, Oregon, mostly to spray crops, at a cost of $1,100 an hour. Warren Howe, the sales manager, said survey work could be done with a drone instead, mapping out what a manned helicopter would be needed for.

Mr. Anderson said that later this year his company would introduce a helicopter for agricultural surveillance that would sell for less than $1,000.

"That's not per hour, that's for the helicopter," he said.

The New York Times

(China Daily 03/24/2013 page9)