Drones also known as unmanned ariel vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft without a pilot on board.
Its flight is usually controlled in two ways; either autonomously by computers in the vehicle (auto pilot) or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground.
A. M. Low’s “Aerial Target” in 1916 was one of the earliest attempt at a powered unmanned aerial vehicle.
There are two types of unmanned vehicles used by the US military on a large in Afghanistan and other places, known a Predators and Global Hawks. Highly skilled aviator pilots fly them. Thanks to a combination of technology advances, a pilot no longer needs to be physically sitting in the airplane.
A first-person view (FPV) aircraft has a front-facing video camera and transmits real-time video to an operator on the ground. The pilot flies the plane by looking at image on a computer screen transmitted by the camera, giving them a feeling like the pilot is sitting in the cockpit.
The (UAV) are unmanned aircraft guided exclusively by GPS or on-board computer analysis of imagery, but they aren’t first-person view UAVs.
Ariel surveillance of large areas is now made possible with such low cost UAVs for livestock monitoring, wildfire mapping, pipeline/home secuirty, road patrol and anti-piracy.
UAVs can be used to perform geophysical and geomagnetic surveys.
MQ1 predator UAV’s armed with Hellfire missiles are now majorly used by US for hitting their ground targets.
To assassinate high progile targets inside Afghanistan: Armed Predators were first used in late 2001 from bases in Pakistan and Uzbekistan.
4756 people have killed been by US UAV’s as per the report of senator Lidsey Graham, in February 2013.
Currently, engineers are working to produce UAVs that are capable of air to air combat, aerial refueling, combat search and rescue with facial recognition and resupply to agents on the ground.
This post belongs to Avantika Bade