Drones

                                           Drones

A gizmo you might call a “drone” could actually fall into a couple of broad categories. One is a fully autonomous vehicle that flies without any human intervention at all. The other is more like a remote-control flier: A pilot is still in charge, but they’re on the ground watching the drone, or in a room somewhere watching on a computer screen or through a pair of goggles. The two types involve different tech with different potentials, but they both count as drones. So we’ll consider them, for the purposes of this guide, one and the same.

The general idea of drones has been around for more than a century. It’s not a terribly novel concept, really: We’ve invented all these cool ways to fly around, but many of them are dangerous, so wouldn’t it be great if humans didn’t need to be sitting inside? You could point to Nikola Tesla’s 1898 demonstration of “teleautomation,” in which he remotely controlled a small boat over radio frequencies. Or to Charles Kettering, who built the “Kettering Bug,” a World War I–era automated missile. Maybe it was the Queen Bee, the first reusable unmanned aerial vehicle, which the British military used in the 1930s for military target practice.