Drone Technology: Invention
and Advances
This article is a corollary to my article
two weeks ago, titled “Robot Technology:
Invention and Advances”. The two articles have similarities and amazing display of human effort in inventing a
technology that mimics human intelligence in functions. While robots are made
to undertake repetitive functions in the industry, assist medical operation,
therapy, work in an environment too dirty or dull to be suitable for human
beings, drone is mostly made to undertake jobs too dangerous or risky for human
being. In fact, drone is one of the classifications of robotic technology.
Drone is technically referred to an
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which includes autonomous drones and remotely
piloted vehicles (RPVs). Drone is capable of controlled, sustained level flight
and is powered by a jet, reciprocating, or electric engine. Drone differs from
a cruise missile because it is is intended to be recovered after its mission,
while a cruise missile impacts its target, damage both the target and itself. A
military drone may carry and fire munitions on board, while a cruise missile is
simply ammunition for a target.
Historically, the first recorded use of drone
for war fighting occurred in 1849 when Austria attacked Venice using unmanned
balloons stuffed with explosives. Austrian forces besieged Venice with about
200 incendiary floating balloons, each carrying 10 kg bomb that was to be
dropped from the balloon with a time-controlled fuse over the besieged city.
The balloons were launched mainly from land, however some were also launched
from the Austrian ship SMS Vulcano. The Austrians used smaller pilot balloons
to determine the correct fuse settings. However, these balloons do not meet the
current definition of drones, which according to The Oxford English Dictionary
is “a remote-less controlled piloted aircraft or missile”.
Another attempt of using drone was during
the World War in 1916 when US Army developed the first pilotless aircraft. The
U.S. Army built the Kettering Bug, intended to be used as “aerial torpedoes”
using gyroscopic controls. Gyroscope is a device used for measuring or
maintaining orientation and angular velocity. The first Kettering Bug flew in
1918, but the war ended before it could be used and thus could not be fully
developed and tested as drone.
After
the World War I, there were several attempts to develop drone by different
people. The first successful, large-scale production, purpose-built drone was
the product of Reginald Denny. He was World War I veteran who served with the
British Royal Flying Corps during the war. After the war in 1919, Denny migrated
to the United States and joint Hollywood as an actor. He made a name for
himself as an actor, and between acting jobs, he pursued his interest in radio
control model aircraft in the 1930s. He and his business partners formed
"Reginald Denny Industries" and opened a model plane shop in 1934 on
Hollywood Boulevard known as "Reginald Denny Hobby Shops".
The shop evolved into the "Radioplane
Company". Denny believed that low-cost RC aircraft would be very useful
for training anti-aircraft gunners, and in 1935 he demonstrated a prototype
target drone, the RP-1, to the US Army. Denny then bought a design from Walter
Righter in 1938 and began marketing it to hobbyists as the
"Dennymite", and demonstrated it to the Army as the RP-2. He modified
it as the RP-3 and RP-4 in 1939. In 1940, Denny and his partners won an Army
contract for their radio controlled RP-4, which became the Radioplane OQ-2.
They manufactured nearly fifteen thousand drones for the army during World War
II
Motivation to expedite action on the
perfection of drone technology appeared during the Vietnam War of the late
1950s. Then, the only spy plane available to the US was the “U-2” at the time when
the spy satellite technology was yet to be developed. Then, there was also serious
concern on consequences, if the pilot of the U-2, spy plane is captured. This
fear came to pass when U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the
USSR territory during operation. This made the work on an unmanned drone intensified
because of its capability to penetrate deeply into enemy territory, and return
with precise military intelligence. Within three months after the shot of the
U-2, the highly classified drone (called RPV back then) program was born, under
the code name of Red Wagon. This drone was quite handy during the war as it
could cross into a new frontier of military affairs: an area of entirely
risk-free, remote and even potentially automated striking the enemy while
completely detached from human behavioral cues. How is the drone launched?
During the war, targeted drones are
sometimes launched from aircraft; or off a rail using solid-fuel rocket
assisted takeoff (RATO) boosters; or hydraulic, electromagnetic, or pneumatic
catapult. An elastic bungee catapult can launch very small target drones.
The most successful militarily drone known
in the last thirty years is General Atomics MQ-1 Predator. It is an American
remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) built by General Atomics that was used
primarily by the United States Air Force (USAF) and Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). It was originally conceived in the 1990s for aerial reconnaissance,
capture data and transmit feedback. It is equipped with cameras and other
sensors. Predator was later modified and upgraded to carry and fire two AGM-114
Hellfire missiles or other munitions. The aircraft entered service in 1995, and
saw combat in the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the NATO intervention in
Bosnia, Serbia, the Iraq War, Yemen, the 2011 Libyan civil war, the 2014
intervention in Syria, and Somalia.
In the seven decades, drones have undergone
a rapid transformation in consumer electronics with advances in technology.
Hitherto, these unmanned aircrafts were originally built for military purposes,
especially, as weapons in the form of aerial missiles guided by remote controls
through radio waves. Today, drones are widely used in series of applications
for the civilian utility in the form of small quadcopters and octocopters. They
are used today for wide range of functions such as monitoring climate change
and delivering goods to carry out search operations after natural disasters and
for filming and photography.
Militarily, UAV is becoming an increasingly
important air power component for more than 80 countries today. UAVs are a
component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which include a UAV, a
ground-based controller, and a system of communications between the two. Modern
military drones typically serve one of two purposes. The first is combat
surveillance, in which a human pilot uses radio control to fly a drone to
different waypoints to scan and mark enemy positions. The second is tactical reconnaissance,
in which a mini drone (not much larger than the commercial drones we write
about here in most cases) flies on autopilot to predesignated targets to take
pictures before returning to a home base.
The flight of UAVs may operate with various
degrees of autonomy: either under remote control by a human operator or autonomously
by onboard computers. While UAVs originated mostly in military applications for
missions too "dull, dirty or dangerous", their use has rapidly
expanded to cover commercial, scientific, recreational, agricultural, and other
applications. Some of the applications include environmental policing, peacekeeping
and surveillance. Others are product deliveries, aerial photography,
agriculture, boarder surveillance, and drone racing. Today, drones or UAVs are immeasurably
used for civilian purposes compared to military usages. In 2015, an estimated
millions of UAVs were sold for non-military uses for commercial applications of
autonomous utilities. Soon autonomous car and home robots surfaced for
utilities and recreations. What are the current advances of drone technology?
One of the advances in drone technology was
introduction of DJI’s Phantom 4 in 2016 by one of the best drone makers on the
marketplace: DJI’s Phantoms. They are the most celebrated drone makers. DJI’s
Phantom 4 was one of the most popular drones on the planet, packed with
high-end features and functionality. DJIs always have the latest models in
their focus and they are always at the top of their class. Again, DJIs also
release new models at a steady rate, packing even better features into a nearly
identical form factor. DJI’s Phantom 4 drone was a smart computer vision and
machine learning technology. This drone had the ability to avoid obstacles and
intelligently track and photograph people, animals, or objects — rather than
being limited to following a GPS signal. The resulting UAV was a major
milestone for drone photography and consumer drones in globally.
Generally, the uses of drones or UAVs have
multiplied in the last two decades. American armed forces alone were reported
to acquire a fleet of 11,000 drones in 2017 compared to less than 100 in 2001. Now
that the technology’s growing exponentially, it is hard to predict the
different functions the future drones will be doing. Your conjecture is as good
as mine.
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