The Octocopter drone was created in 2014 by the Aero M team (Christopher Becker, Peter Ma, Garrick Merrill, Robert Parker and Tiffany Russell) at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC, Huntsville, Alabama) specifically to carry relatively heavy cargo such as the Lidar sensor. It was at NASA’s inaugural 2012-2013 Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) competition, organised by the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and NASA’s Academy of Program/Project & Engineering Leadership (APPEL) as part of KSC’s Rocket University program, that the Aero-M team came first. However, at the end of the competition, the opposing group obtained funding to develop its work on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).