What Is a Drone?

What is a drone?

A drone is, in a tech­no­log­i­cal con­text, an unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cle. Drones are for­mal­ly known as unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles (UAVs/UAVs), unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles (UAS) or unmanned aer­i­al sys­tems (UAS or Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems). Essen­tial­ly an unmanned fly­ing robot. Drones can be con­trolled remote­ly, or they can fly autonomous­ly using built-in soft­ware (flight plan) that works in close con­nec­tion with on-board sen­sors and GPS sys­tems.

In the recent past, unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cles have had exclu­sive­ly mil­i­tary appli­ca­tions, where they were orig­i­nal­ly used to destroy air tar­gets and col­lect intel­li­gence infor­ma­tion. Now drones have a wide range of civil­ian appli­ca­tions, rang­ing from search and res­cue, sur­veil­lance, weath­er mon­i­tor­ing, traf­fic mon­i­tor­ing, fire­fight­ing, per­son­al use, busi­ness focus­ing on pho­tog­ra­phy and video, agri­cul­ture, and even deliv­ery ser­vices.

Historical facts

• The first unmanned aer­i­al vehi­cle was imple­ment­ed in 1935 using the De Hav­il­land DH82B “Queen Bee” full-sized biplane as an exam­ple. It was equipped with a radio receiv­er and a con­trol ser­vo placed in the back seat. Sub­se­quent­ly, it was used as a live tar­get at fir­ing prac­tice from anti-air­craft instal­la­tions in order to train gun­ners. A total of 380 De Hav­il­land DH82B “Queen Bee” air­craft were built. The term “drone” was born thanks to this his­tor­i­cal event.

• At the end of 2012, Chris Ander­son stepped down as edi­tor-in-chief of Wired mag­a­zine to take up drone work at 3DRobotics Inc. Lat­er, with­in the walls of this com­pa­ny, a unique APM flight code was first writ­ten, on the basis of which the well-known high-class autopi­lot, Pix­hawk, was imple­ment­ed. Cur­rent­ly, the com­pa­ny spe­cial­izes in the field of UAVs and imple­ments its advanced solu­tions in such areas as pho­to and video film­ing, con­struc­tion, util­i­ties, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices, as well as pub­lic safe­ty.

*The founder of the unique Pix­hawk is Chris Ander­son.

• At the end of 2013, the well-known pub­lic com­pa­ny Ama­zon was one of the first to use com­mer­cial drones in test mode to deliv­er prod­ucts for sale. Lat­er in 2016, this idea was sup­port­ed by: Vir­ginia Poly­tech­nic Uni­ver­si­ty and the State Insti­tute, togeth­er with the Alpha­bet Inc hold­ing, using the Wing test project as an exam­ple, the pur­pose of which was to imple­ment the deliv­ery of goods pur­chased on the Inter­net or essen­tials using drones.

• Drone pro­duc­tion soon began to expand. Embry-Rid­dle — Avi­a­tion Uni­ver­si­ty, has long been a train­ing ground for the avi­a­tion indus­try. It cur­rent­ly offers a Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence in Unmanned Sys­tems, a Mas­ter of Sci­ence in Unmanned Sys­tems, and basic train­ing cours­es in Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems.

• 2016 From BI Intel­li­gence’s “The drones Report”: “Drone rev­enue will increase to $12 bil­lion by 2021. BI Intel­li­gence ana­lysts esti­mate that in 2015 it was already over $8 bil­lion.”

Drones have become wide­ly used in the field of sur­veil­lance and jour­nal­ism, since UAVs have the abil­i­ty to access places where it is impos­si­ble for a per­son to reach.

Drones in the enterprise

The inte­gra­tion of drones and the inter­net has enabled the ubiq­ui­ty of drones in busi­ness­es; Drones oper­ate on ter­res­tri­al IoT sen­sor net­works, help agri­cul­tur­al com­pa­nies mon­i­tor land and crops, ener­gy com­pa­nies use drones to inspect pow­er lines and relat­ed equip­ment.

Drones and security

The high demand for com­mer­cial and pri­vate drones has also raised a num­ber of safe­ty con­cerns regard­ing the con­se­quences of col­li­sions and loss of con­trol. In this regard, many coun­tries have intro­duced a num­ber of amend­ments to the air code at the leg­isla­tive lev­el. There were no-fly zones “No fly”.

Accord­ing to Russ­ian leg­is­la­tion, drones with a max­i­mum take­off weight of 0.25kg to 30kg are sub­ject to manda­to­ry account­ing. It is pro­posed to cre­ate a data­base of drones and oth­er UAVs, which will be offi­cial­ly named “Unmanned Civ­il Air­craft” (UCA).

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A photo

Military drones

Commercial drones

Civil drones