Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Terms of Autonomy

Abstract

In the last years demand has grown in both military and civilian life towards making machines, that could do their missions faster, more independently, more accurate and with more endurance, as cheap and safe as possible. It is hard to define autonomy in both engineering and ethical terms, and it is even harder to draw the line between automatic and autonomous machines. The article writes about the improvement of drones regarding autonomy, categorizes them by levels of autonomy bringing some examples from the past, the present and the near future, and shows how the drones may make their own decisions.