Abstract
Drones are highly maneuverable machines capable of flight, combat, and surveillance. My capstone project and STS research converge on this reality. They examine drone technology from both the engineering design side and the human consequences of the surveillance it enables. Together, they reveal a worry: as unmanned aerial systems become smaller, more agile, and more undetectable, they can be used to monitor every move. This leads to psychological harm.
My capstone project involves designing and constructing an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) modeled after a dragonfly's biomechanics. The UAS uses quad-winged, independently flapping flight. This is designed to achieve maneuverability that conventional quadcopters cannot match. The UAS remains lightweight and difficult to detect. Equipped with a live-streaming camera system, it is built for surveillance and reconnaissance in confined or sensitive environments. The goal is to bridge the gap between biological principles and aerospace design to advance current micro-aerial vehicle design.
The advancement of drones must be closely monitored. Engineered for stealth and persistent monitoring, these drones can enter the lived experiences of the people they observe. My STS research, framed through Peter-Paul Verbeek's theory of technological mediation, investigates this idea. Rather than treating surveillance as a data-collection process, my research argues that both visible and invisible forms of surveillance actively reshape human behavior, self-perception, and psychological well-being. Drawing on empirical studies and qualitative interviews from Afghanistan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe, I found that surveillance consistently produces self-censorship, social withdrawal, and erosion of trust. These effects intensify when the observed cannot understand or appeal to the system watching them. Verbeek's framework proved essential for this analysis because it rejects the assumption that technologies are passive tools, instead positioning them as forces that mediate how people perceive the world and act within it.
My paper makes the case that responsible drone design cannot stop at aerodynamic performance and power efficiency. If surveillance technologies mediate human experience as profoundly as my STS research demonstrates, then engineers building the next generation of observation platforms bear a responsibility to anticipate those mediating effects. Design choices around detectability, data handling, and operational transparency shape the psychological and social conditions of the people these systems will observe. Advancing drone capability without advancing ethical safeguards risks reproducing the patterns of conformity and distress documented throughout my research.
Notes
School of Engineering and Applied Science
Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering
Technical Advisor: Haibo Dong
STS Advisor: Sean Murray
Technical Team Members: Lily Byers, Kathryn Geoffroy, Theodore LengKong, Jafar Mansoor, Justin Matara, Owen McKenney, Andrew Mercer, Carter Nickola, Jeremiah Nubbe, Nicholas Owen, Mark Piatko, Luis Ramos-Garcia, James Scullin, George Zach
