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Daniel Drew

Daniel Drew

Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, leading the Drew Research Lab and the NASA NIAC-funded SPARK project for ion-propelled aerobots exploring Titan's caves.

Sep 30, 2026

18:43
Oh, you've said a lot about, you know, tendentially what all of these things do, but if we fit it all together, what is
18:50
SPARC? Okay.
18:51
SPARC is a meter or sub-meter scale aerobot.
18:55
So, it's a lighter-than-air vehicle platform with distributed propulsion across its surface.
19:00
And the propulsors are not typical, like, propellers.
19:04
They are these atmospheric ion thrusters.
19:07
So...

7 MINS LATER

26:22
So what kind of autonomy are you building into Spark? Right.
25:07
So what are the pieces of this that are... are applicable outside of titan 2 right because there's obviously the the autonomous control some of the navigation work that you need to do like i would imagine some of that stuff percolates out to other planetary missions pretty well or even earth use cases are there components there that you're looking at to be more genericized or are you like just this is the titan mobile
25:36
There are two ways to talk about that.
25:37
I guess there's the ion thrusters, the balloon concept, and then there's the rest of the mission.
25:44
There are lunar cave
25:47
missions now which are being developed and some at NIAC this cycle.
25:54
And some of the autonomy work and doing communications and power from inside a cave that carries over.
26:00
But that's not where our core innovation is.

33 MINS LATER

59:17
Do you have anything to plug? Do you want to talk about Hawaii stuff? Which people know about you?

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