With all the current focus on the boom in drones used for national security, it’s easy to forget that the civilian drone market is growing, too. In addition to the struggling but persistent attempt by logistics giants to scale drone delivery services, drones have also revolutionized photography and videography and have become fixtures in the workflow of infrastructure inspection operations.
They’re also increasingly used for environmental monitoring, an application that certainly has great opportunity for growth in an era of mounting ecological crises. The same factors that have given additive manufacturing (AM) life in the defense sector are also driving its heightened relevance to the production of drones for all other applications. That explains how two Harvard students graduating this spring were able to create a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) drone concept that has the potential to improve upon existing methods for tracking sperm whale populations.
The two students, Kuma McCraw and Mikaya Parente, both mechanical engineering majors, explained the rationale behind the project in an interview for the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS):
“Our project addressed the difficulty of accurately locating sperm whales tagged with VHF transmitters,” they said. “Unlike GPS-enabled systems, these tags only provide signal strength, meaning researchers must collect measurements from multiple positions to estimate a whale’s location. Current solutions rely on quadcopter drones, which are limited by short flight times, low energy efficiency, and suboptimal antenna configurations. These limitations reduce the amount of area that can be surveyed and make it difficult to maintain sufficient antenna separation for accurate signal triangulation.”
According to McCraw and Parente, they first got the idea for the project in 2025, when they collaborated on a quadcopter for the annual MakeHarvard hardware design competition. That gave them their introductory experience in making drones with 3D printers, which they were inspired to take to the next level in their senior project.
Quadcopters are generally cheaper and easier to use than VTOLs, but, as McCraw and Parente note, they’re meant to fly for short periods of time — about 15-30 minutes — whereas VTOLs can achieve long-range flights lasting 1-6 hours. After a month of planning out the project, over a period of around five months, they used 3D printing and other manufacturing techniques, including hot-wire foam cutting, to rapidly iterate towards a final design. Then, they engaged in live flight testing and CFD simulations for final refinement of the concept.
Ultimately, in well under a year, the two undergrads taught themselves how to design and build a working long-range drone concept that, in a real-world setting, could outperform typical data-collecting methods.
As I’ve repeatedly written about over the last year, there is a major investment cycle happening right now supporting the manufacturing R&D capabilities available at US universities. This story isn’t even the product of that trajectory, but it perfectly exemplifies why the US manufacturing R&D landscape is such a worthwhile recipient of investment dollars.
McCraw and Parente haven’t even launched a business based on their idea, and they may have no intention to do so. But what they did for their senior project had all the elements of the necessary steps on the path to starting a successful business, and there are plenty of cases of 3D printing leading to successful enterprises born in university startup accelerators.
AM, of course, isn’t the only piece of the puzzle in those success stories, but anyone would have to agree that cheaper manufacturing processes that students can teach themselves are making it easier than ever, at least in a technical sense, to start a hardware business. Like I’ve mentioned before on this topic, I think that the most logical future for US education lies in giving students as many tools as possible to nurture their entrepreneurial creativity.
One of the few positive angles to the current state of affairs, in which all societal norms and institutions seem to be being leveled simultaneously, is that a space could be opening up to rethink how we do things like higher education. Younger generations are coming up with the kinds of ideas that their elders have been too complacent to see or allow. That should be given all the encouragement in the world.
Images courtesy of Harvard SEAS