Remote control equipment might even displace some human pilots, in the cockpits of cargo planes.

“This is money,” said Matthew L. Opsahl, in another part of the University of North Dakota simulation lab, at a work station where an operator could coordinate the activities of several remotely operated planes. One person could handle six cargo planes at a time, he said, or direct ground-based crews of several remotely operated planes that were scanning a large-scale event, like a spreading forest fire. The operator could compare the aerial images with those from Google maps, identifying street names and addresses to forward to a 911 call center.

Mr. Opsahl, a former pilot on a regional jet, is now an instructor in the North Dakota program, where Mr. Regenhard, 21, a junior from Prescott, Wis., has a double major in commercial aviation and in unmanned aerial systems. Mr. Regenhard is also building a six-rotor helicopter that will beam pictures back to the ground, one that might inspect rooftop air-conditioners or offer a bird’s-eye view of a crime scene.

Equipped with a GPS sensor and a $220 autopilot, it can be programmed to fly to a sequence of coordinates, at various altitudes, much the way an airliner can. Or it can simply broadcast its position to a distant ground station, where an operator can use a computer keyboard and mouse, or a joystick, to direct it.

The unresolved question is how to avoid midair collisions, because the operator on the ground cannot see other traffic in the air. 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.

The progress of electronics seems relentless. Mr. Anderson, of 3D Robotics, 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 rapid progress has driven a burst of commercial activity, along with a lot of anxiety. Mr. Regenhard was teamed up one recent afternoon with Mr. Becker, whose company had written a program that simulated a Cessna 182, a single-engine plane familiar to generations of student pilots, and was integrated with a variety of computer-drawn landscapes, some real, some artificial.