A southern Texas university was granted 290 flying days for their drones, with specific permission for flying zones, by the Federal Aviation Administration.

"South Texas meets a lot of the criteria for the FAA," Ron George, senior research development officer at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi told Fox Latino. "It's sparsely populated, it's got a lot of different geographical features ... and one of the criteria for the FAA is a lot of diversity in geographical features."

The Lone Star Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center at the university has been granted flying space mountains, high deserts, agriculture, coastal and maritime topographies, including the Gulf of Mexico and other virtually unpopulated regions, Fox Latino reported.

Many of the locations correlate to a study for industry uses, such as oil and gas companies or agriculture.

Since it was designated a test site by the FAA -- in one of only six states with the designation -- the Center feeds data from its flights to the Administration, making the approvals worthwhile for the nation's flying authority.

Drone use is potentially a multi-billion dollar industry, and is still in a very experimental phase right now in understand and finding commercial and research applications. The Center received requests from at least 60 private companies to test software and drones, Fox Latino reported.

"The industry is demanding that drones are allowed in the air for business purposes," George said. "Oil and gas companies want to survey their pipelines ... agriculture wants to use unmanned aircraft as well."

But there are still challenges the FAA needs to work on like understanding how to regulate the drones from breaching privacy and how to keep them from bumping into other flying objects.

Congress passed legislation directing the FAA to integrate unmanned aerial systems into the nation's airspace in 2012, with a target of 2015.

Currently the military and federal government have used drones, such as for border patrol. But there is still more work to be done to make them more useful, even for those purposes.