UC Irvine professor of electrical engineering and computer science Peter Burke has broken a Guinness World Record – for flying a drone halfway around the world. Burke and his team used cloud computing and the internet to fly the drone 11,440 miles, from Irvine to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. He was assisted by students and research engineer Patrick Jeanty, who piloted the drone from the University of La Réunion.

Burke never set out to break the record – officially “the farthest distance to control a commercially available unmanned aerial vehicle” – and only later discovered it was available.

Up next for Burke and his students: a project focused on preventing drone collisions.