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Photo by Scott McClurg

Joshua montgomery, of DARcorporation, explains the group's hopes for building unmanned aerial vehicles for the government and other companies. Montgomery is pictured with a remote-controlled helicopter that is part of Kansas University's research into such vehicles.

A Lawrence-based consortium is working to create flying equipment that one day could buzz criminals from above, serve as portable cell-phone towers or gauge the moisture content of soybean fields.

Its goal: to build a $30 million "center of excellence" for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs - a market expected to hit $10 billion a year during the next decade.

"We have all these groups around here doing all this cool stuff, and we just needed to get them together," said Richard Colgren, associate professor of aerospace engineering at Kansas University and co-founder of the Kansas UAV Consortium. "It makes sense, from a center-of-gravity standpoint."

The effort already is taking flight, thanks to a $10,000 seed grant from the National Science Foundation secured by Colgren, who spent 20 years as an engineer at Lockheed-Martin's "Skunk Works," where he worked on projects ranging from the B-2 bomber to the F-117 stealth fighter.

Now he's about to be part of another grant: $19 million from the science foundation to study polar ice caps. KU will use the grant to develop sensitive equipment to measure the densities and characteristics of the ice.

Colgren's team will receive about $3 million to develop the systems and aircraft to get the sensors in position to collect the three-dimensional data.

"It's like an MRI of ice," Colgren said.

Such applications are only the beginning for the KU research, said Joshua Montgomery, an aerospace engineer at Lawrence-based DARcorporation and member of the consortium.

The consortium is asking Congress for $1 million to establish a "UAV center," likely in Lawrence, to consolidate university research and its commercial applications. Another $1 million request is pending to develop the potential for hydrogen fuel cells in such vehicles.

Montgomery looks around the state and sees business aircraft being built in Wichita, and avionics and other technical equipment being developed in northeast Kansas. He sees no reason Lawrence shouldn't be on the map in the next frontier for flight business.

Businesses such as DARcorporation, whose nine employees handle design and other tasks for a variety of companies, are poised to expand as KU-generated research expands its reach.

"Kansas is the center of the general aviation world, and there's no reason it shouldn't be the center of the UAV world as well," said Montgomery, a graduate of KU's engineering school. "The University of Kansas is full of wonderful staff ... and having those skills, along with industry partnerships and government partnerships, is very advantageous and gives us high hopes for success."